whatarethembits

Because I want to spend less time online.

Consuming things like comments gives my brain a false sense of social participation. It uses up my limited "social participation budget", with nothing to show for it. Often I reach for comments to see if an article is worth reading, has obvious false information, or see what the "consensus" is and instead I end up wasting time on anything but that. Its not good for my mind to marinate in contextless opinions of random people and increasingly, bots with an agenda. Sorting through all of that in my head uses up energy that could be better spent with real people. If I can simply see a summary of something potentially useful in under a minute, then my brain will get its dopamine hit (or alleviate FOMO) and be uninterested in sinking hours on something detrimental to my life. My experience suggests that, out of all countless hours I've spent on the internet reading things, less than 1% of it has been of any use to me. Its been a net negative.

How often do I feel the need to eavesdrop on a group of people I don't know, discussing something in real life? Almost never. Why would I want to do that online then? Also its mostly kids online. Why would I want to eavesdrop on what a bunch of kids are talking about? And yet its difficult to avoid due to the nature of aggregation platforms. If it were up to me, I'd filter out any and all content generated by or aimed at people under 25 (or even 30).

Imagine surfing the web without ever hearing anything about or adjacent to US politics, celebrities, Musk or AI? I'll seek out that information as and when I need to.

Yes, I can just not use certain websites out of sheer will. I've made progress there, but it can be better still.

I'm hoping that something like this can condense a 1000+ comments thread to couple of paragraphs at most.

That is exactly what I want. A boring but factual summary of useful nuggets from the mountain of shite that is ALL of social media. For example, on any given day, reddit/X/Bluesky/HN only has a couple of paragraphs worth of stuff that I care to know about. I want to train my brain to equate the internet with something boring that's only worth visiting when I need to look up information. I want this tech to reduce my (and hopefully others') use of internet to down by 98%.

I want to go to news.ycombinator.com/reddit.com/etc on any given day and just see a couple of paragraphs and maybe a few reference links to follow if I so choose. Spend a few minutes reading that and close it.

All of that in the hope of diverting my limited time/energy on Earth to endeavours in real life with real people.

Kinda looking forward to something like this, as it has the potential to remove empty junk calories from the internet, hopefully leading to SIGNIFICANTLY less use of today's popular platforms.

My wish list:

- Eliminate ALL clickbait titles and ads. I only want to see a dry factual title.

- For any given topic, I only care about the main article (with the option to only see a summary, unless its a high quality blog) and couple of substantive comments, rest is junk I don't want to see.

The current state of popular social media sites has meant that I don't use it at all (except HN, which is trending in the same direction due to saturation with AI), but every other week or so I end up wasting a few hours, which I'd like to avoid entirely.

Ideally this would lead to 98% of content filtered/summarised out, and over time only use the internet for looking things up with intention. I want this to remove majority of "entertainment" value from the internet (by default) so that time/energy can be refocused in real life and high quality sources (books) only.

These would be more helpful if it were illustrated with a real example/session transcript. Virtually none of these workflows move past vague descriptions; not sure if I should read more into that.

Do you mean Claude Code? If so, that's what I use(d) primarily for development, and Claude Desktop for general chats. My issue with Opus was that, every time I start a new task in Plan mode, it'd use 50k - 100k tokens and that'd by about 20% of the session limit. A bit of back and forth and its done for most of the work day. Just not feasible at all. The tasks I wanted it to perform were fairly small and contained, "Look at these three files @@@ and add xxx to @file. DON'T read any other files. If you need more context, ask me.". That worked sometimes but not always, still burned a lot of tokens.

Almost everything described in the post, amounts to a few hours in total in a given year to do "manually". I agree, there isn't compelling value (yet).

What's puzzling to me is that there's little consideration of what one is trading away for this purported "value". Doing menial tasks is a respite for your brain to process things in the background. Its an opportunity to generate new thoughts. It reminds you of your own agency in life. It allows you to recognise small patterns and relate to other people.

I don't want AI to summarise chats. It robs me the opportunity to know about something from someone's own words, therefore giving a small glimpse in their personality. This paints a picture over time, adding (or not) to the desire to interact with that person in the future. If I'm not going to see a chat anyway, then that creates the possibility of me finding something new in the future. A small moment of wonder for me and satisfaction for the person who brought me that new information.

etc etc.

Its like they're trying to outsource living.

Maybe the story is that, outsourcing this will free them up to do more meaningful things. I've yet to see any evidence of this. What are these people even talking about on the coffee chats scheduled by the helpful assistant?

Yeah, the fact that Europe hasn't been able to develop another OS in the last few months/years is proof that nothing can change. Stop trying and wasting time; any effort in this direction is futile.

The landscape has completely shifted now; now more than ever, there's a real need for Europe to pivot from relying too much on an adversary.

I’m in the market for buying two new fridges for our new house; this post reminded me to filter out Samsung immediately. I LOATHE ads.

  > We'll keep support for MV2 extensions for as long as possible

Zen browser is my home currently, I think Arc has broken my ability to move back to traditional tab management.

  ...worse overall experience...

I like Framework's aesthetics more than MacBook already, and like the little customisablity (i.e bezel, mismatched coloured parts etc). I can accept a lower quality screen (compared to MacBook), speakers and camera no problem.

I'm willing to pay higher than MacBook price for the above package due to superiority of Linux over MacOs and supporting this model in general. However, I draw a line in the sand at battery life, so Mac it is for me for the foreseeable future.

I don't own a Framework (yet), as I don't believe its the right product for me at this stage. I can't afford to get caught out without battery when out and about.

What attracts me is:

• Easy (self) repairs, especially OEM battery replacements. If I could carry two - three replacements that could be hot swapped, like old times, that would be acceptable too.

• Easy upgrades of RAM and SSD. I had to buy a new MacBook due to it hanging frequently from RAM filling up, even though rest of it would've been fine for at least three more years.

• Ability to make it "your own". Its a minor thing, but a little whimsy is nice in life. I also like the idea of my main machine being a ship of Thesus that stays with me for a long time, and shows marks of age.

Battery life is the only thing stopping me from getting out of the Apple ecosystem. As soon as a viable Linux laptop with "enough" battery life becomes available, I'll make the switch. At that point there's nothing on Apple side that couldn't be done better in Linux (with a bit of work, but that's okay).

I travel a lot, and often on standby for work during that time. I need to be confident that when I pull the laptop out, there's ALWAYS enough juice to respond to a situation immediately without worrying about anything else.

If Framework offered hot swappable batteries, even if a quick restart is required, I'd be fine with that because at least I wouldn't be stranded in that case. And I'd be happy to pay as much as a MacBook, or a bit more even, purely for ideological reasons. Apple's dominance is bad for all of us.

This is disappointing from DHH. He tends to carry a lot of criticism online, and based on my exposure to his ideas in long form media, I tend to agree with him more than not. However, in his linked post on this issue, it strikes me as being written by someone whose understanding is largely based emotions evoked by provocative news headlines. But, I'm going to refrain from attempting to psychoanalyse an individual who I know very little about (further than the previous sentence).

OP's post, I think, correctly points out that DHH appears to believe that British == White. Wish he'd be clear on this point, as he's often claimed and indeed has been in the past regarding other issues. Dancing around it shows a lack of respect for the audience and/or a sign of weak conviction.

If you believe in something strongly enough to want to have an impact on its discourse, why not be clear about it? Here's an example of a clear statement regarding this particular issue: "I believe that our country ought to aim for demographics where 80% of the people on our streets look like us [whatever that happens to be]". What's so difficult about that? A clear demand/objective easier to vote on/measure/debate....everyone knows that, then why do the proponents of such ideas always dance around being specific?

If this leads to lower quality videos, due to change in incentives, for certain segments, then I would consider it a WIN for users. For the portion of users for whom the lower quality is not palatable, they will get their time back to spend on other things in life.

This is all completely subjective of course.

Rhetorical: What does it say about America that a large portion of its citizens (assuming OPs feelings are not unique) fear being a victim of genocide? Can't say I've met anyone from any other "developed" nation who share the same dread by simply existing as part of their country.

In other words, the sum total of America's values have resulted in a citizenry that lives with existential dread. Maybe those values need a second look?

I generally recognise utility of AI, but on this particular point, it has been a net negative if I were to add up the time I wasted by believing a summarised answer, got some length further on given task only to find that the answer was wrong and having to backtrack and redo all that work.

I can’t read any text on homepage with iOS Safari as first few characters/words of each sentence is cut off. Text justification is different on different pages. Vertical spacing and images are uneven across the site. FAQ accordion animation is jittery and the hamburger menu doesn’t open actual menu from any other page other than homepage. Going back to homepage from FAQ page renders homepage in previous state, such as with sidebar open, momentarily before resetting to expected state. Focusing on input on sign in page zooms in on email field, but half of it is off page.

I’m assuming this is work in progress and currently it’s been vibe coded to MVP stage?

I'm curious where this ends up going.

Personally I think its a mistake; at least at "team" level. One of the most valuable things about a software or framework dictating how things are done is to give a group of people a common language to communicate with and enforce rules. This is why we generally prefer to use a well documented framework, rather than letting a "rockstar engineer" roll their own. Only they will understand its edge cases and ways of thinking, everyone else will pay a price to adapt to that, dragging everyone's productivity down.

Secondly, most people don't know what they want or how they want to work with a specific piece of software. Its simply not important enough, in the hierarchy of other things they care about, to form opinions about how a specific piece of software ought to work. What they want, is the easiest and fastest way to get something done and move on. It takes insight, research and testing to figure out what that is in a specific domain. This is what "product people" are supposed to figure out; not farm it out to individual users.

Its early days. Agree with your point that the "vision" of the future laid out by tech people doesn't have much of a chance of becoming (accepted) reality, because its necessarily a reflection of their own inner world, largely devoid of importance and interactions with other people. Prime example, see metaverse. Most of us don't want to replace the real world with a (crappy) digital one; the sooner we build things that respects that fundamental value, the sooner we can build things that actually improves our lives.

With (most) note taking systems, you’re supposed to periodically “clean house/review”, which among other things, avoids the problem you’re describing. I don’t do it often myself tbf.

Honestly, its mind boggling. Am I the worst prompter ever?

I have three python files (~4k LOC total) that I wanted to refactor with help from Claude 4 (Opus and Sonnet) and I followed Reed Harper's LLM workflow...the results are shockingly bad. It produces an okay plan, albeit full of errors, but usable with heavy editing. In the next step though, most of the code it produced was pretty much unusable. It would've been far quicker for me to just do it myself. I've been trying to get LLMs on various tasks to help me be faster but I'm just not seeing it! There is definitely value in it in helping to straighten out ideas in my head and using it as StackOverflow on roids but that's where the utility starts to hit a wall for me.

Who are these people who are "blown away" by the results and declaring an end to programming as we know it? What are they making? Surely there ought to be more detailed demos of a technology that's purported to be this revolutionary!?

I'm going to write a blog post with what I started with, every prompt I wrote to get a task done and responses from LLMs. Its been challenging to find a detailed writeup of implementing a realistic programming project; all I'm finding is small one off scripts (Simon Willison's blog) and CRUD scaffolding so far.

This issue doesn't get enough attention; apart from the obvious implications on bad UX, I find myself losing interest in a project after realising its broken in so many subtle and non-subtle ways due to the underlying tech. I, like many others, got into programming due to the joy of creating something beautiful and attempting to follow (influencer led) JS trends nearly killed my interest in this field at a time.

Interested in something similar. Would love to keep a log of locations, especially when travelling, but don’t want Google to be tracking this. A local solution would be awesome.

What hardware are you running this on? I’m interested in trying out local models for programming, and need some pointers on hardware

I find that making design decisions about the class/feature you’re writing or how data is going to flow through your little corner of the software scratches similar itch to “big picture” architecture. What sucks is standups, deadlines, constant having to give updates and being measured on output. Take all that away and programming is a _joy_

As someone who’s done this for a small project recently; it’s not comparable. The mental overhead and application complexity is significantly lower with htmx. Yes I’d get a better ecosystem and more features with a front end, but do I really need it? Turns out the answer is no, at least for me. In short, with htmx and alpine, the ceiling of what I can achieve is much higher than before. In fact it meets almost 100% of requirements on projects that I’ve worked on in the last 5 years. The few cases where I’d need to opt for something bigger, usually a component or two on particular pages, I’d imagine I could reach for something like Svelte for those components alone.

I find that I’m able to move dramatically faster with this paradigm and able to maintain old codebases as a solo dev with minimal mental overhead. If I’m to give that up, there better be a really good reason. I haven’t come across that situation yet.

If I’m rebuilding the same components repeatedly, how is this better than copying my existing component markup from my library of components/snippets and making small tweaks as required?

Coming to that project with fresh eyes (both, when someone else had written it or I’d written it six months ago), I’d know immediately what to do to make a change confidently in the left picture, and I’d be dreading trying to piece together what rules exactly apply to DOM components after untangling specificity hell.

The left picture has everything I need in that screenshot, the right picture would require me to work out how specificity rules cascade down to each DOM component to even start thinking about what to edit.

This is a great showcase of why people ought to choose tailwind if they value their time and just want to get on with things in the real world.