What did you replace it with (if you did edit: scratch that, I brain froze and was thinking of "did you replace it with a regular phone") ? Most accounts I read of people ditching their smartphones mentioned they started carrying an ultra light laptop or small candy bar computer (for instance). Basically increasing inconvenience to reduce usage.
you can accomplish a whole lot of the same keeping the phone and deleting all social media apps and accounts (what I did). I still use my phone as a map and camera and many other things … my screentime went from 7+ hours to hardly ever over 40 minutes daily
I keep coming back to the sites on my phone's browser. I have tried using various firewall applications to block network traffic. But it's hilariously easy to get around them.
You can actually disable the browser in a pretty serious way in iOS. First, ask your spouse/friend/colleague to set up parental controls on your phone and have them hold onto the code. Second, remove Safari through Content & Privacy Restrictions. Third, set up Downtime in whitelist mode to run all day. This way, Safari is disabled and an alternative browser cannot be installed from the App Store. If you want full control of your phone back, you'll need to ask your spouse/friend/colleague for the code – totally doable but now it's pretty difficult to get around the restrictions.
Something similar should exist for Android with regard to parental controls. Though for Android, I suppose you could also just uninstall/disable both the browser and the Play Store through adb.
Parental controls on Android are a bit more complicated and require another Google account. I'll take the latter route. I'll just install something like Firefox Focus, which clears browsing data on exit. It will help for one-off searches or an app that launches the browser for some process. I'm not sure if disabling the Play Store is a good idea. It might cause problems with updates. Right?
Woah I never heard this before. Very novel. Is the theory here the grey scale is less visually stimulating compared to full colour? LOL, it almost makes me wonder if we need a Duplo mode that makes everything crap 8-bit colours and low-res to scare people away from their phones.
that is actually not the focus. phones in it of themselves are not actually a problem, what we do with them is. you get phone companies to provide under-16 phones which have ability to call, text, use Map and limited browser capacity and not a single soul would complain about kids having phones on them. not a single soul might be a stretch as of course there’ll always be someone but you get my point…
That is actually the focus of my question and comment:
> > *I threw away my smartphone 4-ish months ago,*
> *What did you replace it with* (if you did edit: scratch that, I brain froze and was thinking of "did you replace it with a regular phone") ? Most accounts I read of people ditching their smartphones mentioned they started carrying an ultra light laptop or small candy bar computer (for instance). Basically increasing inconvenience to reduce usage.
Now if you could stop hijacking the thread and assuming I don't know smartphones can be tweaked that'd be cool.
> As someone who was a past military jet pilot and navigator, the one thing I still notice I have is an uncanny unconscious/subconscious sense of time. It's not perfect, but I rarely sleep through alarms and if I intend to wake up at a certain time, I have about an 85 percent chance of waking up, looking over at my phone, and seeing 1-2 minutes prior. If I'm going something like cooking in the kitchen, I still set timers, but often get an uncomfortable feeling of "you should go check that" that's within a minute or two.
It's interesting, I have the same ability: waking up 2-5 minutes before the alarm clock, feeling the washing machine or the oven alarm will ring in 20 seconds~2 minutes. I am rarely off and when I am it's by a huge margin. But I have no background or job or hobby history that would have helped fine tuned that. I also don't rely on it, I often set timers.
> I understand what you're saying, people framework hop and what's popular does change frequently, but we're not all using Frontpage still, are we?
yeah, we switched to WordPress. I am glad we didn't follow up on our web agency 5 years ago to switch to gasby. Our wordpress is still running fine. I am glad we are not considering switching to Astro, since wordpress will still be there in 5 years.
Will WordPress be there in 5 years? Regardless, it has a cost.
It's hard to compound a conversation about cost on the backdrop of agencies. A lifetime ago I worked at agencies that predominantly leaned on WordPress. WP is a complex, dynamic webapp, running 24/7. A long history of security holes both in itself but more in the fleet of community plugins that agencies install by default, and the "one click" hosting software they lean on (cpanel et al) to avoid hiring actual operations teams all cause problems. Deployments are objectively awful and demand scrappy maintenance work over an amount of regular server time.
Once a static Astro site is built, that HTML is static and safe, forever. Cloudflare, AWS, Github, and a hundred others will host it for you, for free. Just pay for the domain.
We charged clients £100pm+ just for treading water with WP and there wasn't profit in that. WP does allow clients to make changes themselves but in my experience agency clients need brand and graphics support. The cost of updating a website is insignificant to regular graphics work.
I can't say what sort of client you are, but we're looking at a cost saving of £6k in five years by not having some underqualified junior babysit a server.
The output is better on Astro too. Usually. I'm sure an agency could find a way to make an awful Astro site.
> Will WordPress be there in 5 years? Regardless, it has a cost.
WordPress will probably be around in 5 years, but I don't think anyone can say that the plugin ecosystem and open source community that WordPress heavily depends on would, especially with what has been going on in the past months.
In minority report there's a scene (https://youtu.be/NwVBzx0LMNQ?t=43) in a forensic/detective office in which MC swipes data and info on the screen (hologram ?) with their hands. Then at some point another character moves a physical object (data drive ?) from one desk to another and at first I am thinking "yeah, right.. no network to move data from one screen to the other, uh ?".
But then I remind myself of this passage from Virtual lights (Gibson):
> Was it significant that Skinner shared his dwelling with one who earned her living at the archaic intersection of information and geography? The offices the girl rode between were electronically conterminous-in effect, a single desktop, the map of distances obliterated by the seamless and instantaneous nature of communication.
> Yet this very seamlessness, which had rendered physical mail an expensive novelty, might as easily be viewed as porosity, and as such created the need for the service the girl provided. Physically transporting bits of information about a grid that consisted of little else, she provided a degree of absolute security in the fluid universe of data.
> With your memo in the girl's bag, you knew precisely where it was; otherwise, your memo was nowhere, perhaps everywhere, in that instant of transit.
Divine sort
A sorting algorithm that takes a list and decides that because there is such a low probability that the list randomly occurred in its current permutation (a probability of 1/n!, where n is the number of elements), there must have been a reason for the list's order. Therefore, it should be considered sorted in a way we don't understand, and we do not have any right to sort it to our beliefs, as if it were sorted "as God intended." Also known as Intelligent Design sort.[11]
I supposed I am getting older and that's the reason but I recently tried playing Horizon Zero Dawn LEGO and Cyberpunk and... the lightning was too much. I can't focus on what matters on the screen (can hardly find the hot spots), to the point where I'd tried to lower the quality settings to have less lightning elements and flatter textures. I noticed for those games that I really need high FPS (>60) otherwise I can't focus well enough.
It's not just you. There's a real problem right now with the push towards graphical fidelity (specifically "realism") coming at cost to readability -- most of which is informed by careful choices in the game's art (lighting, level design, style, etc.)
The main example I can think of is the "yellow paint" discourse w.r.t to games like Resident Evil 4 remake Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth. Freya Holmer has a really great thread on the latter: https://x.com/FreyaHolmer/status/1756276112462627119
To be clear, I don't think the push towards realism is at odds with having a stylish and readable game. But the more dimensions you're dealing with (greater complexity in lighting models, materials etc.) the more difficult it gets to tie everything together into something cohesive.
