Is there any hope of turning this trend around or at least keeping it where it is? I don’t think that the months spent on my phone have benefited me or anyone I know.
Old guy here who grew up without phones but later felt the dependace they were creating in me so worked to stop it.
You have to start with yourself an be an example. It is an "addiction of sorts" (maybe a very strong habit?), but think of it like telling an alcoholic to just stop drinking.
Like an addiction, you need to get rid of the Pavlovian ringing bells to help you through.
Rule one: Turn off all notifications and turn on battery saver mode.
Rule two: Get off of all social media. I am including HN with this. Delete them, you will be fine. HN is the only place I talk online now and only on my laptop, but its days are numbered for me.
Rule three: Leave your phone behind. Probably the hardest. I started just by leaving it the car when I was shopping, then leaving it home when shopping.When I ma at the coffee shop I leave it in my bag.
Rule four: Do not use your phone at all when you are home. Start by setting time limits and extend them, but no one died stopping cold turkey. I only even use my laptop in the morning to read news
Rule five: Learn to do something else with your hands. Cook, work on your car, clean your house, anything.
Rule six: Be OK with "not knowing" and try to stop searching the internet every time a question pops up in your head. This was very hard for me because of my clinically diagnosed OCD. I found the "checking" my phone was allowing me to do just made my OCD worse in the long run.
I am at the point now where I use my phone so little the battery lasts five days easy with 20% left.
These are all good points - and ones I’ve been trying to follow for the past few months. Rule five was the most important one for me. Anytime I have an urge to doomscroll, I make a conscious effort to do something IRL instead. Taking up a deep hobby which can take years/decades to actually master seems like a better time sink (practicing visual art in my case)
The thought that quitting social media is harder than quitting smoking also helps cement the idea that it is bad for me when I try to dissuade myself from using it
Yes, dicipline is needed there as well. I do a lot if genetic reseach and I look at my laptop as a tool, a potentially dangerous tool, like a woodworker using a lathe, i stay alert and focused on the task at hand.
My laptop is essentially a desktop as well. I only use it on a desk in one room.
I never turn to these devices out of boredum. That is the best rule.
Plus, steven black on github has a great host file blocking all kibds of websites.
Notice how gen Z is less anxious than Millennials and Gen x when it comes to losing their phone. I think that younger generations will have a better understanding of the addictive nature of phones from a young age and will learn that they will not go far if they are absorbed in their phones. My hope is that we will learn to use the easily available entertainment on our phones like we learn to use recreational drugs, with moderation and respect.
They’ll grow up with it and it will seem boring in adulthood.
Millennials had it dumped in their lap like GenX and haven’t had time to build “cognitive antibodies” but I think that’s starting to happen
Elders were addicted to TV for similar reason, but as a Xennial I grew up on TV and find it fucking boring.
Teen use of drugs and alcohol, sex is way down compared to prior generations.
It’ll take time and progress can be hampered by avarice of powers that be coughVCcough
Human biology is analog not digital. It’s far more fluid than a machine; one can be a social nut but care for themselves and others because philosophy of proper social etiquette is pretentious phrenology like bullshit. It’ll evolve defenses on its own that corpo won’t be able to anticipate or ignore until it’s too late. And just not giving a fuck to begin with is an option. Not much Sam Altman, PG can do if people just don’t use these stupid things if people just evolve into nonsense discourse but keep stuff on the shelves.
IMO in the US we need to take a minute to live by Tim Leary’s mindset, drop out and get strapped and remind a couple hundred mega rich 8 billion other people don’t actually need them.
> Notice how gen Z is less anxious than Millennials and Gen x when it comes to losing their phone.
Wait, what? Has this been your experience? My sense has been the exact opposite: the younger the person the more attached to the phone and the more sense of existential dread when it goes missing.
Yeah, I'm Gen X and if I don't have my phone, it is an inconvenience. But my Gen Z son misplaces his phone and he is completely panicked and non-functional.
Relevant story: In 2015-2016, I was the commander of a few hundred new troops going through their initial Army training; not basic training, but the subsequent stage where they had a bit more freedom. When they violated the rules, I had the power to take away those freedoms, fine them up to a few weeks of pay, etc. Most of them endured that without blinking an eye.
Eventually I confirmed with the lawyers that I could also take away their phones, and that broke some of them. I mean that I had troops break down in tears in my office when I informed them of the punishment, and some went to extreme lengths to circumvent the punishment and secretly gain access to another phone. (They still had laptops and Wi-Fi, by the way, along with permission to borrow a phone if they needed to make an important call.)
The Army has studied this a bit and found that not allowing troops to have their phones during basic training is a significant obstacle to recruiting right now.
Decades ago I would come home and crash in front of the TV — watching dreck.
At least in the evening I think the mind needs to disengage, relax. That can be found in watching "Forensic Files" or playing online solitaire or scrolling through BlueSky.
Perhaps reading would be a better substitute though.
TV is nowhere near as addictive as social media. Take it from someone who watched hours of it daily as a teenager and then barely even missed it upon going to college. Social media has all the niche stuff that wouldn't merit a 30-minute TV series. It's unpredictable, funny, local and international in ways TV never is.
Screen Time on iOS (which Android picked up later) was a response to people being concerned about being on their phones all of the time.
"Uglifying" hacks (mostly using the grayscale filter) are popular too.
Then there are purpose-built devices like the reMarkable and Daylight Computer that tout "focus" as a selling point.
All that said, I don't think we (in the US) are ready for a complete social media cleanse. Lots of people use tricks to reduce their social media consumption (not too dissimilar to quit-smoking tactics, interestingly), but the overall reaction to banning TikTok was overwhelmingly negative. Furthermore, their stats on phone use while driving are actually low; one study actually claimed that 90% of people did this (and my experiences walking and biking around all but confirm this).
It feels like for a lot of people (I'm including myself in that) "reducing social media consumption" is a somewhere between "reducing my cocaine usage" and "reducing my heroin usage" it's so compulsive. I'm not sure there's much to be done except not be on it.
Give it 10 or so years and The Thing(tm) will cycle around to the next thing.
Previously it was gaming (namely consoles), before that was TV, before that was comic books, and so on. Every generation has its "Spends Too Much Time on The Thing(tm)" stereotype.
The difference is that you can take your phone with you but the same can't be true for the TV or the gaming console. That's a big factor.
I suspect more people would have bought Apple Vision if it was cheaper/more affordable. I suspect a lot more people would have bought it if it was 1/2 weight at $1000 and didn't require that dangling battery. The future will be people with their phones hooked to their faces.
> Previously it was gaming (namely consoles), before that was TV, before that was comic books, and so on. Every generation has its "Spends Too Much Time on The Thing(tm)" stereotype.
I feel like we spend way more time on our phones that what we (or they) used to do with consoles, TV, comic books and so on.
Get a kindle and start reading books. That’s what's keeping me from staring at a phone all the time. I might be spending similar amounts of time looking at a screen but at least I get something valuable out of it.
One of the things I don’t get about the panic over phones is that we’re panicking over phones and not what’s done on them. Why buy a kindle, when you can use any of the many ereader apps out there? If the concern is discipline while on you phone there’s also ways to lock yourself out of apps and websites after X amount of time on them.
Even if many of us old school computer users don’t quite like it phones are the general purpose computing devices for many people. There’s no reason to worry about the generic time spent using them.
Yea that’s totally fair. I’d actually second the kindle/ereader recommendation if the goal is to read more. One awesome feature of the kindle is that it auto syncs progress so you can use your kindle for most of your reading but if you’re away without it the kindle app on your phone will know what page you’re on.
> there’s also ways to lock yourself out of apps and websites after X amount of time on them
I've tried this, but it feels like a big administrative burden, having to think about how long each app should be, when it should be available etc, similar to the feelings I had on Facebook about bureaucratising friendships (who's an "acquiantance", who's a "close friend").
It feels like you have to make so many explicit decisions for digital stuff that was much more fluid before - don't want X to come to a party? Don't phone them.
I dunno. What’s better about a book (at least, a fiction book read for fun) than HackerNews, for example? I mean, I don’t think either is particularly good but I’m not sure how the book would be an upgrade.
I've tried a lot of things like app blockers and so on, and what has given me the best sense of control is simply removing the phone from my physical presence. I.e. turned off or silent in my bag or in another room. And being intentional about when I bring it out. This has given me a huge productivity boost. (I commented about that boost a while back and some guy actually accused me of lying because he found it so unbelievable!)
I still average about 2 hours a day on it. Most of this happens when I'm eating or using the bathroom and would not be productive time anyway. By the metric of this article that's still 1 month of my life per year. Not sure I see this as a huge problem, if I did, I could cut it down even further.
Maybe we should be more concerned about a related figure - the time we spend consuming digital media, which is now pushing 8 hours per day. The phone is a very pervasive vessel for that but when I cut back phone use I found that media consumption on other devices started creeping up so I'm trying to work out ways to avoid that. I think our lives are richer if we create more and consume less.
Nah I think twitter is among the worst. It doesn't actually make you more informed of anything actionable you'd actually benefit from being aware of. It just broadcasts the most shallow rage-bait possible, from a constantly updating stream of pointless arguments and mentally ill strangers.
It honestly decreased my baseline well-being far faster than anything else, even when I'd just try to follow the most insular network of math academics and art people. At least tiktok was vaguely more positive and the occasional gnome footage or afghan giant conspiracy was fun.
Out of curiosity, how did you decide on the size of the device? Was it driven by cost considerations, preferences of the founding team, something else?
I think it’s a little too big for me, but I’m tempted.
Embarrassingly, I’ve been writing Go for a while but never really thought about it. Now that it’s been mentioned I’m curious why this isn’t baked in by default for errors. Does anyone know?
You’re supposed to prepend the context to an error before you return it, so the final error reads like a top-level stack trace: “handling request: fooing the bar: barring the baz: connecting to DB: timeout.”
Errors are just values. They don't have any special meaning nor is there any special ceremony to create them. A panic must start from calling panic(); there's no function or special statement to create or return an error.
It might be possible to augment every `error`-typed return such that the concrete type is replaced by some synthetic type with a stack trace included. However, this would only work because `error` is an interface, so any function returning a concrete-typed error wouldn't be eligible for this; it would also add a lot of runtime overhead (including, at the very least, a check for nil on every return); and it would cause issues with code that still does == comparisons on errors.
On the whole, I think error-wrapping solves the problem of tracing an error well enough as the language exists today. If errors are going to start having some magic added to them, I think the entirety of error-handling deserves a rethink (which may be due, to be fair).
> I’ve been writing Go for a while but never really thought about it.
Don't feel bad, I've tried to do this in some places, but I'm not sure it's worth it. It adds a ton of boilerplate to Go's already verbose error handling, since you need to wrap every error that gets returned from libraries.
Good error-wrapping discipline works better than stack traces, because not only do you have a trace of the calling context, you also have the values that caused the problem. Granted, a stack trace "always works", but it will never have the values of important variables.
Now you mention it, a stack trace with function calls and all their arguments would be really powerful. But also expensive, ideally it would have zero overhead or only have the cost if you actually look at it / want to debug it.
One of the major optimizations is to pass function arguments in registers instead of on the stack. These registers might preserve their original values by the time you unwind the stack, but in many cases, probably won't. Preserving those values would lead to fewer available registers and/or more frequent register saving, which would create at least some overhead, even if you don't ever inspect it.
There are probably lots of situations where it's worth it, though.
That's still under the assumption that errors are exceptional, rare, and require a stacktrace to debug. But most errors are not exceptional and do not need debugging, like idk, a row not found error in a database.
A crash, sure, that might need a stacktrace to debug. But that's already in place.
I am always so conflicted about adopting new desktop environments. Every time I feel like I dump 10-20 hours into it and still end up using my mac more often. This looks so tempting, but I feel fairly confident the outcome will be the same for me. Maybe the only way to achieve this is to get rid of my macbook.
That stuff is definitely interesting! I’m thinking more about getting involved in things like PyTorch DDP and the internal equivalents I’m sure many companies massive scale companies are developing. Perhaps ML infrastructure is not exactly the right term for that…
Thank you for your insight! I was planning on checking out triton too once I got a baseline understanding of gpu programming in general. The problem you described is right in the realm of problems that I am interested in working on. I’m really looking to work on finding efficiency in distributed training and inference.
I would be surprised if the original board’s reasons for caving in were not influenced by personal factors. They must’ve been receiving all kinds of threats from those involved and from random twitter extremists.
It is troubling because it shows that this “external” governance meant to make decisions for the good of humanity is unable to enforce decisions. The internal employees were obviously swayed by financial gain as well. I don’t think that I would behave differently were I in their shoes honestly. However, this does definitively mean that they are a product and profit driven group.
I think that Sam Altman is dishonest and a depressing example of what modern Americans idealize. He has all these ideals he preaches but will happily turn on if it upsets his ego. On top of that he is held up as some star innovator when in reality he built nothing himself. He just identified one potential technological advancement and threw money at it with all his billionaire friends.
Gone are the days of building things in a garage with a mission. Founders are no longer visionary engineers and designers. The path now is clear. Convince some rich folks you’re worthy of being rich too. When they adopt you into wealth you can start throwing shit at the wall until something sticks. Eventually something will and you can claim visionary status. Now your presence in the billionaire club is beyond reproach because you’re a “founder”.
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