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rnkdsvja

Re:Ask HN: How did you stop drinking? on Tuesday October 11, 2022 @12:45AM (#33159616)
I wish you luck. One data point: my story. Not a recipe, but maybe something helpful.

I drank hard from high school through grad school and into mid life. I was high-performing and functional, and I am told that I was nicer when drunk than sober. I could never stop at 2 drinks. I tried and swore to stop many times. Never held.

One day 12 years ago, I had my last drink. It was a bender. The next morning I swore I'd stop, similar to many times before. I cannot explain why I stopped that time and not earlier. Day 1 sober was easy. Day 14 was hard, but I didn't go back. But I did count the days, and had pride in collecting sober days. It was an internal counter I had early on. I also knew that 1/2 measures wouldn't work. I would need to reset back to day 0 if I had even a sip or just one. I really didn't want to reset my counter. At some point I stopped counting days, and was counting weeks, and then months. Now I count years, and expect to count decades.

Slipping is not a character flaw, and it's not helpful to beat yourself up. Acknowledge it, sleep it off and move on. Quitting was not a matter of willpower. I did go cold turkey, but I cannot claim it's because I'm strong or anything special. I'm lucky. I believe my wiring changed that night, the balance never tilted back to where it was for me. Maybe the right combo of neurons got pruned. I don't know. I don't really know what was so different about that night for me, but that was it. And it absolutely was not willpower or mind over matter or anything like that. I just changed. And because of my experience, I believe the "willpower" argument is destructive and insulting. People who offer such advice don't understand. I'm lucky. I changed. That's it. My willpower had nothing to do with it.

Over time I discovered that habits matter a great deal. I discovered I needed to develop new ways to fill time since large blocks of weekends were no longer booked with me rendered mentally useless. I also had to develop new social skills, since I could no longer rely on the "nice" me. I also eventually realized how lucky I was that nothing really bad ever happened to me.

This is an issue with both mental and physical health implications. Asking for help is a good start.

Again, I wish you luck.

Re:Two types of privacy on Monday June 27, 2022 @09:23AM (#31894247)
posting from a throwaway account -- I worked at a few audience measurement companies, DNT was never looked at -- completely ignored. The reason was simple: all upside to ignore, no downside. Regarding fingerprinting -- I know firsthand the places I worked at considered it, and rejected it. Problems are: too cumbersome, they do not persist over long enough periods to be useful to the industry, and they cannot be shared with other companies in the data marketplace. An adversary can use them short-term, but if an adversary has the data to do that, they probably have additional more accurate means at their disposal. Also, in my view, academic papers on this subject always seem alarmist and naive, and methodologies have problems (lack scale, have selection bias, lack ground truth, overlook persistence over time, etc.)

{edited} - the way DNT worked in practice led to a very misleading, and harmful effect. Standards should be designed with stakeholder incentives in mind.