sjw987

For those who don't want to use Twitter, I would also suggest replacing it with nothing.

Good point. My grandad used to call it the history as well!

Depends on the publication.

I read The Economist, which doesn't cover sports at all.

It's mostly 1-2 page long articles for each story, blocked into categories (UK, Europe, US, The Americas, Asia, China, Business, Finance, Tech, Culture at the end).

I think it's important to keep reading the news occasionally.

Personally, I, as a programmer, read the news in the same way as my grandad who was a farmer. I read a printed weekly publication (in my case The Economist) on Sunday morning. Outside of Sunday morning I don't read the news at all.

I prefer printed news to media-supported news, because I think the imagery (I acknowledge The Economist still has images) and presentation of news, especially on TV detracts from the message it's trying to convey a lot of the time. After reading some of Neil Postman's books (notably Amusing Ourselves to Death), I find it strange to watch televised news whereby one minute I'm watching footage of a disaster, then the next minute I'm seeing sports news updates or an advert. Just like normal learning, I think news demands longer form content for proper understanding.

Reading the news on a low frequency basis also gives time for news stories to properly develop. Breaking news can be filled with speculation and incorrect details, which even if you keep up with, you can miss later corrections or crucial details. Not to mention the stress involved in it. Chances are if some real breaking news happens, like a natural disaster or war, I'll hear somebody else tell me.

And if they simply want something tailored for themselves?

Something designed without content suggestions, ads, influence and constant un-necessary redesigns, for privacy and to retain their own data.

Good for you economically. Some people are unemployed and underpaid. In fact, most are. Half of your post just came across as you broadcasting your economic success.

This seems like an incredibly defensive take for vibe coding personal apps.

Replacing some subscription app like Any.do, Google Calendar, fitness/diet tracking or basically any other CRUD-centric app, needn't be insecure, and a semi-competent developer can easily host it, continue further development (with or without vibe coding) and secure it. There's huge benefit for software developers that do find themselves using many of these apps with active subscriptions to make their own, tailored for themselves, and cut down their spending.

Yes, when it comes to commercialising such software, more work needs to be done (mostly in support and marketing), but for personal use it's fine. The author explicitly states they don't trust vibe coding enough to turn these into products.

The writing is hardly on the wall for all these companies which make little todo list apps and calendars. The vast majority of people could get a LLM to produce an alternative but the lacking they have in basic software engineering would eventually be a hurdle to further development. Most people will continue spending $1.00/month here, and $2.99/month there. There's no reason why software engineers need to do that anymore, unless paying this gives them access to some sort of content repository (music, books) or actual advanced software.

That's understandable. I have quite minimal music taste so my setup worked for me. I only listen to music at home when I'm not doing anything else and it's mostly classical so there doesn't tend to be too much to add at any given time.

A minimal web client audio player with some basic database tables in the back for organising and searching does me fine.

Making your own software is a good way to escape enshittification and influence.

I switched from Spotify to buying MP3s and using my own audio client, because I'm fed up of a company telling me which music I should listen to every single time I open the app. It costs more, but I own the music and I escape the constant redesigns, price increases and influential behaviour.

Most apps are very simple and there isn't too much to learn, especially if you're building it to scale to a userbase of yourself. I can't see the need for a ton of CRUD apps which demand subscription fees personally. If you build them yourself, you get to keep your own data, build it out the way you want it, keep it that way, and use computers as a person using a tool as opposed to a customer buying a product.

I have never understood social media.

For me, talking face-to-face is the only real means of socialising. I can barely even see the appeal of having a proper conversation on a chat application (they're much more more ideal for arranging meetups, sharing information quickly and keeping up with people far away).

It's incredibly annoying that we're expected to shift real world social interaction into these apps and platforms. It annoys me when somebody I meet begins talking to me more on chat apps than they do in real life.

However much more than that, I cannot understand the concept of posting personal details, media, worldviews and opinions underneath your own name on some platform, in which anywhere from dozens of friends and family, to the whole world, can see it. Even large group chats seem unappealing. What is the appeal of this for anybody besides the people that run such platforms for engagement and advertising?

Why do people want to see others they do or don't know doing this? What's the point of it?

Why does anybody want or engage in systems of digital reputation (likes, kudos, karma)? Moreso why are these values, or the number of followers/digital friends in anyway important? We all know that these things can be openly bought. It pains me to imagine all the one line comments, and upvote/downvote with timestamps being stored on a server somewhere.

The wildest part is that the companies that provide these platforms are worth more than companies that actually produce meaningful products and services. These are platforms that could only succeed by being free* and then abusing existing users.

Hacker News is the only place online I post, and I only do so in a non-social discourse. I don't know anybody I've replied to or been replied to by on here, and nor do they know me.

People want different interfaces for the home screen of their device, obviously.

I want a black background, with a simple A-Z list of the apps I have on my phone, with some hidden. No icons, no transparency effects and animations.

I've never done Android app development. How simple or advanced are we talking to build something like this?

This sounds like my exact setup with Octopi. Just I have 4 scrollable home screens with the 4 most used apps as large white icons.

Sad news. I've been using Nova for years now, across multiple devices.

Thankfully my build is super minimalistic and another launcher was able to replicate it pretty quickly. Black wallpaper, white icon pack, list app drawer with a few folders, 4 scrollable home screens with large white icons for the most frequent apps (browser, Gemini, personal lifestyle logging app, Signal conversation with wife).

The idea that there might be ads (albeit on the free tier) is ridiculous, but then again that is the final frontier for adtech companies. I've often thought the Google stock launcher will likely soon have ads, just like Microsoft started trying to slip them in with Windows 10.

Wrist based sleep tracking is worse than finger.

Oura for measuring sleep. Garmin for tracking physical exercise. Oura always reflected the timings and my feeling much closer than Garmin (Enduro), which basically always told me I had bad sleep (started late after my last woken moments and ended an hour early).

My own thought, it's honestly best not to track sleep unless you feel you have an underlying issue. It causes more anxiety than it solves. If you're tired, go to bed earlier, adjust tech use and food consumption before bed.

Not sure why Garmin or any of the exercise tracking watches are being used for sleep tracking. They're infamously bad at it from my experience.

The rings (notably Oura) are much better. I used to wear both and they gave completely different results, with the Oura being far more accurate to how I feel and the timings of going to sleep and waking up. Garmin almost always reckoned I woke up an hour earlier than I did and ended the tracking there.

It's honestly best not to get too involved in tracking sleep. The analysis does more to ruin your mood and give you nocebo effect than it really gives useful information.

I will confess, I do still wear my Garmin to bed because I like the vibration alarm over anything audible.

you are going to get well under a 50% success rate here. Accept that most people flake

This is true, but as long as the success rate is >= 1 other person, it's okay.

I started a running club for my apartment block (about 200 flats with maybe 300 residents). I posted flyers out once advertising it as a friendly social running club. Of the 300, the group has about 15 people, of which 5 are regulars (every other week at least), and just 2 of us are super regulars (multiple times per week). It's a terrible success rate, but those are 4/5 good friends.

At first it bothered me how flaky people were. Some people joined the group but have yet to show up in person. And some joined the group and are yet to even converse in the group chat, but hey, they'll come along when they're ready.

I'm already there. I never use social media and I limit news consumption to once per week for catching up.

I'm seeing these messages in the real world. Adverts on the side of buses are telling me to enlist in greater frequency, and job sites have positions in the Royal Army pinned above everything else.

Does anybody get the looming impression that the probability they'll die in war is approaching 1? I don't know which country / group of countries it'll be against, but I get the impression that a lot of our fates are being written out right now.

Advertisements around where I live are gradually all becoming about joining the military. My country is sending troops to territories as if they are tripwires.

That's quite hardcore. Well done.

I've noticed the same flatness you're describing with a similar product. The other week I had two items spaced across different meals. I'm still permitting bread as long as it's real or homemade (4 ingredients max, hard after 2/3 days), which was the first, and then later I had "made-in-store" chips with the a bunch of UPF and spices (preserved).

After about 2 weeks of minimising UPF, the bread tasted much better than it usually would, even on its own. Then not only did the chips taste flat like you've experienced, but they didn't taste good, and I felt I could almost tell what they'd added to try and get you to finish them.

I find it quite insidious how much food is falsely branded as healthy ("Just Natural" snack bars) or fresh. Not just items that are dressed up as if they are made fresh in-store, but foods proudly showcasing claims about things added, or nothing bad being added, only to be invalidated by checking the ingredients on the back.

The extra difficulty to eat was a pretty big takeaway for me from that book. Imagining most processed food as having been broken down and reformed, the breaking of the food matrix, the sort of pre-digestion that stops my body doing that instead, the hurrying of the eating process to get more in before the body works out its full, have all been useful for me to slow down my eating and avoid this stuff in general.

I have noticed that my scattergun approach of avoiding stuff that's been transported long distance and overly branded (judged by packaging in both cases), has made supermarket trips very quick and simple. 80% + of the big stores must just be rubbish.

It's led to me doing most of my shopping at local markets, where things are loosely packaged in paper. The book > avoiding branded packaging got me down the road of avoiding plastic wrapped consumables wherever possible, because plastic leeching is also a concern.

The only disadvantage is that my food environment has shrunk a lot, and as an endurance runner it's made it quite hard sometimes to get enough energy in. For that reason I don't think I can drop pasta and bread entirely.

That's a nice way to give the postie a pleasant walk on a lovely summer day.

Interesting. What hardware do you use to measure this?

I have a Netatmo home device that measures PPM and have been observing the trend lines throughout the day. At some points my flat gets up to about 1400, which the device says is bad, and sometimes it goes down as low as 500. I've noticed a pattern but can't quite connect that pattern to my activity or the surroundings. It starts going up around 4pm, which could be homewards-bound vehicles, but it seems to trend even on weekends when there is lower traffic. Maybe I start breathing differently at these times. I'm quite interested in getting to the bottom of it. Unfortunately I'm west facing so plant use is quite limited.

What is the atmospheric ambient CO2 level? Is that variable based on location?

I've learnt a few things:

- I had my sensor on my work desk which meant the CO2 pooled, and was increased dramatically by my breathing almost directly onto it. Moved the sensor at least 1.5m

- I had the sensor quite low down, where CO2 pools (being heavier), so moved the sensor to eye level

- CO2 seemed to increase when cooking (same room), so while cooking I open the windows and let the warmth flow out of the building

I've been exploring kefir. I'm looking at finding some live grains to boost the store bought variety here (10-20 varieties) up to 50-60 varieties or so, like the kefir in Eastern Europe / Russia. The store bought stuff in my country (UK) is more like a diluted, gimmicky thing. However, I believe the strains of bacteria they do include are some of the more influential ones. I think it would just be interesting to expand the scope a bit.

This came from reading about the gut microbiome, which was spun off from reading a book about Ultra Processed Foods (Ultra-Processed People). I've been trying to remove UPF foods from my daily consumption, trying to lower the ratio of them I eat (the average is supposedly 60% for adults in my country), since the academic link between UPF and dementia is quite strong now. It's quite shocking to see just how much of a typical supermarket/food store is UPF, and where many of the emulsifiers and preservatives come from.

"I have built more in the past 10 months than I ever have."

Correction. The genAI has built it.

I haven't got any skin on either side here, but doesn't the fact the genAI can build it imply that what you are doing is heavily trodden ground, that there will be less and less need for developers like you, and will gradually lead to many developers (like you) being cut out of the market entirely.

For personal stuff it's wonderful. For work, it seems like a double edged sword that will eventually cut the devs that use it (and those that don't). Even if the business owners aren't completely daft and keep a (vastly diminished) workforce of dev/AI consultants on board, that could easily exclude you or me.

It's going well if all the jobs it eradicates can be replaced with just as many jobs (they can't), or the powers that be catch on and realise there isn't that many jobs left for humans to do and institute some form of basic income system (they won't).

I don't think this is based around GLP drugs. I've noticed the gym, swimming pools, running and cycling routes I usually frequent have been lower every year for the past 5 years or so (the spike in January is smaller every year).

I think new years resolutions are dying out, or people are doing non-fitness based resolutions (eg. Dry January) more often now.

“users who stop taking it gain the weight back” is not a baseless claim.

Most of the people on GLP will come off the drugs and regain the weight back to their original weight, if not heavier, just like people who temporarily restrict eating in any other way (discipline). You need real lifestyle change. Even the people shilling the drugs tell people that.

Personally, I hope all of these business fail. Screw the fast food industry, dieting companies (they don't want customers to actually succeed), and the pharma companies that are restricting access to people who actually need GLP drugs.

This is the most sensible attitude I've seen people express that has led to meaningful weight loss, maintenance and as far as we can see across large timespans, lifestyle change.

It's incredibly hard to gain weight by eating whole or minimally processed foods. The destruction and recombination of foods (and their food matrix) into ultra processed foods is one of the driving causes behind people eating more because the artificial textures and softness is one of the main drivers of over-eating, especially of high calorie foods.

I'd wager that people could replicate the same satiety induced weight loss (to a slower, but safer extent) through minimising ultra processed foods than GLP drugs.

It reduces your supermarket shop to about 10% of the store. Almost anything packed and transported is out of the question, as are entire rows of capitalism-driven junk food.

It's entirely discipline and motivation. Just because only a select few people carry it through and maintain it doesn't change that. Just very few people in this world are truly disciplined and self-motivated.

You can see it all around you in one form or another:- overweight/obesity, alcohol consumption, smoking/vaping, people spending 5+ hours staring at glowing rectangles.

You're in the faux enlightenment that everybody gets during weight loss. Everybody I've ever known losing weight starts discovering the wonders of healthy eating and nutrition as they lose weight, vowing never again to go back to their old habits. Then they slip further down the line and 1-2 years they're back to their original weight, plus some.

Weight loss isn't the challenge. Maintaining it for the rest of your life is.

Good luck with fixing that future mess. This is such an incredibly short sighted approach to running a company and software dev that I think your cofounder is likely going to torpedo your company.

It's amazing that this isn't common sense to most people.

I foresee the overwhelming majority of people on these drugs regaining everything (and maybe even going beyond their original weight), because, just like traditional dieting, they don't actually change their lifestyle. They're just giving their system a shock, which when it goes back into fat storing mode will overcompensate due to the shock of the loss.

The nihilist in me doesn't believe that many people are truly capable of massive lifestyle change. Once you've lived a certain way for 20 or 30 years, any change beyond that is just a fleeting thing. Yo-yo weight loss and gain just proves that. It only becomes a real lifestyle change after many years.

In the UK, it's incredibly common for dog owners to do this. When confronted about leaving the bagged dog shit somewhere they always say they're going to pick it up on the way back, yet the next day it's still there.

Modern British dog owners are incredibly irresponsible surrounding how they look after their pets and how they handle the pets mess. Covid made it measurably worse.