I personally had an interview with Google once, and had doubts about it. I was rejected, and I am glad of this, as I am not sure if I'd have enough strength to refuse the offer. With Facebook and Oracle, at least I am sure I would not choose to work there (unless in more dire life situation, as far as I can say now...)

In the future people will look at Facebook and Google as the people of today look at Phillip Morris and BAT.

By default, it's a device that's receives a million notifications, but I've turned off most of them, so it's back to being a tiny computer that's helpful to look stuff up with. I only get notifications on four things:

1) phone calls - it's still a phone

2) "texts" (SMS/WhatsApp/iMessage/Line) - I disable Slack because it's too noisy aside from one "emergency" channel for work

3) one email account that notifies me of new gmail logins, foreign transactions, bank withdrawals, etc. to keep the junk mail away, i use filters on my other accounts to forward emails to this one special "notifications" account

4) financial ticker (which is set to only notify when something drops more than 5%)

Sure, I might miss some chats and I'm always behind on Twitter, but so what?

Imo the amount of noise is extreme in stock news and there is no value in listening to it. It is wasted attention and wasted emotion. Much better is to pick a few stocks/ETF's and invest on a longer horizon.

for what purpose? If you go long, you don't have to worry about any disturbance on the market. 5% per day or 5% per hour? Is there any difference if your stock will drop today 5% wrt yesterday or if it drops 5% this month relative to last month?

I don't look at such swings, it's meaningless.

You seem like you're trying to get back in touch with the idea of 'Quality' as it applies to life, and he does a good job at walking a reader through it. I won't bother going into what I got out of it, as most philosophy is best experienced without preconceived expectations

Nowadays, you have to slow down. Most tech businesses thrive on shallow thinking to drive engagement, and try to tweak every little heuristic to "get a click" to justify their own existence.

By all means, take a break, but understand as well that as a practitioner you are part of the problem every time you refuse to say no to some dark pattern B.S.

I've started measuring every software pitch against my first set of Encyclopedia of the Natural World CD's from back in the 90's.

No phoning home. No ads. No engagement metrics No dark patterns.

Just an encyclopedia of 0's and 1's.

It is amazing when you look at most software nowadays, and realize that a large proportion of it (especially on mobile) is trying to convert user->value instead of providing value->user.

I have similar traits that I am actively working to wear off. My only addictions are Twitter, Hacker News and Yahoo Finance. I spend at least 4 hours in a day flipping across these. I must admit Twitter is quite helpful because my feed is well curated. YF is a total waste of time - I don't know why I keep checking the stock prices when I know for a fact I won't sell anything. It satisfies some part of my brain to keep watching the tickers. What a fucking waste. Hacker News is useful too. What has helped me in the beginnings of my de-addiction is measuring how much time I am wasting and writing it down. It's kind of a slap in the face to get up in the morning and see that you wasted 4 hours the previous day.

I can't even talk to other people about it because everybody's noses are in their phones everywhere. Is that weird?

Perhaps hanging out at an old fashioned bar might not be bad. Not the ones with fancy music but the ones that remain somewhat rustic, where you can just have a beer and a random conversation.

My big time sucks are hn, fark for news, and occasionally reddit. I'd like to at least drop reddit from my routine, and maybe only come to hackernews when I've gotten through every other article open on my phone.

Seem like good goals. The screen time app is nice because you can actually set limits on how much you can use an app then it bugs you with a warning.

I've been trying to read more lately, it's wonderful. Just finished For Whom the Bell Tolls, and started in on some Kafka. But it's definitely different then when I was younger and would just tear books up.

I think maybe I'll blacklist reddit at least with the proxy on my phone and then only browse that on the laptop which would be much rarer and far less likely since there's so many more interesting things to do on the computer (I just discovered the joys of tmux, how was I missing you all these years? With tmuxp, what a powerful set of tools.)

Anyways, that's my experiences, these little gadgets are incredibly addicting, and with three link aggregates with nigh on never ending pages of links it's ridiculously easy to spend a tremendous amount of time with your face in the screen.

When I was 19, I finished John Grisham's The Partner in one sitting - without even getting up for food. Something like 24-30 hours non stop reading. There's no way in hell I'll be able to do that now.

I try to make it a point to ignore my phone while I'm eating lunch with people. I do wish others would do the same. Sometimes, it does require politely asking them to put their phone away and just spend lunch with me (typically just with friends, not everyone).

However, I think it annoys me more that it's becoming harder and harder to find restaurants that don't have 5+ TVs in your face no matter which way you turn.

This is one thing I loved about rural Ireland. The service out there was so shitty and was a pain in the ass to get a text message in the old pub, let alone data. So it forced you to be more in the present with the people you're chatting with, even if they were just locals while you were visiting. It was really nice, actually. I wonder how a bar that is built to specifically jam signal while inside would fare?

You can still use your mobile then but it's nowhere as easily done as a compulsive action.

Sauce: I had to do this myself for a few sites including HN at work..

I believe a side effect of this connected world is making everyone seem unspectacular, and therefore everything we do (compared to what we observe around on the net) unspectacular. Maybe the real detriment of the internet's influence is that it makes everyone feel like we're wasting time when their may not be a way to spend it in a way that makes us happier.

Now they do that with The Internet.

Before telly that it was radio and newspapers. Before even that it was books.

The more things change the more they stay the same. Is it possible humans simply aren’t meant to be totally productive always on all the time and that we crave time wasting on a fundamental level?

https://hackcabin.com/post/become-digital-nomad-bali/