I recently switched to a used Minimal Phone (no longer being made sadly) and its been great for this. The best thing for me is to just make the phone completely unappealing to use, but still capable of essentials. A slow refresh rate eink screen helps a lot with that.
For the authors complaints about ads, I recommend paying for ad free versions of things you truly enjoy. Budgeting will mean you consume less and have fewer choices, but enjoy it more. And if something doesn't offer an ad free experience you can pay for, that's a great reason not to use it.
It's difficult to turn your phone off if you have a spouse or children or other dependents who you can't drop communication with for hours at a time. But it's helpful to strip it down to the essentials so it doesn't double as an entertainment device.
It is in actual fact not difficult to "drop communication with for hours at a time". This was the human norm for millenia, up to a decade or so ago. And given the toxic side effects of all this communication it's probably going to have to be worked out again.
We raised a child with the principle that "No News is Good News". She turned out great! And she lives that way still. That constant level of screen stimulation is strictly not necessary for family happiness, and I think you all who think so have not really internalized what it means for a child to learn responsibility.
See also free-range kids, and the social insanity that causes kids/parents to get arrested for eg playing in a park alone. There's a bunch of mental illness out there, and the screens are big reason why.
20 years ago I would be reachable at work on my desk phone. I’d be reachable at home on the landline. I’d be reachable at the hotel via reception.
The only place that remains is the hotel.
If I were out and about and wanted to reach home or the office I could drop a coin in a payphone. That’s not possible now.
That’s before you factor in changing societal expectations on reachability.
When it comes to kids, they would be able to phone home as they remember their home number and have some money or worse case could reverse charges from a payphone. That’s not possible today.
The need to be instantly reachable at a moment's notice is a modern anxiety that we successfully lived without until the mass penetration of cell phones 20 years ago. Your spouse and children will manage without being able to text you for a few hours, just like spouses and children did for the first 100,000 years of humans history.
That's ridiculous. We have managed without electricity or antibiotics for 100,000 years too. Are you keen on reading by candlelight or dying of preventable infections?
Instant messaging and calling is extremely valuable. Algorithmic social media is extremely noxious. Unfortunately, they both live on the same device.
A more apt comparison is would you be OK reading by candle light sometimes for a few hours? I would be, it’s perfectly fine to read for a few hours by a bright candle.
I would prefer to give up algorithmic social media for 24h/day (massive negative impact) than to give up calls and texts with my friends and family for a few hours (no negative impact).
Comparing smartphones to antibiotics is somewhat ironic given that smartphone addiction is a disease, not a cure to one. There is no law of the universe that says that technology cannot create ills where previously there were none. I assure you that you are allowed to turn your phone off for hours, days, weeks, forever if you so choose, and your life may be better for it.
Did you read why I wrote? It appears you completely ignored it and are just talking past me... Yes I goddamn know "technology can create ills where previously there were none", that's why I called algorithmic social media a catastrophe.... Swear to god
> Instant messaging and calling is extremely valuable.
They, and I, are disagreeing with you. Instant messaging and calling are nice-to-have at best, and a huge burden at worst. They teach an extreme codependency that has little benefit, and causes a lot of anxiety.
They're convenient when somebody needs to go to the hospital, needs to get picked up, you can't find somebody in a museum, you're at the store and somebody at home might need something.
You are rarely using it for this. You're mostly wittering on and on about nonsense and not giving each other any room. When others go silent or don't answer quickly enough you get nervous about what they think about you, or if they are in danger. When others are interrogating you about things that make you uncomfortable, you feel like you have to answer now or you're making a statement with your silence.
Most of the useful stuff could be moved to a house phone (which doesn't exist anymore) and a payphone (which doesn't exist anymore.) For the people farther away, writing a letter was better. You don't need to be on the back of somebody 1000 miles away. There are too many of them, and companies and governments slip in. It's not healthy and it's not safe.
Please don't project on me. Doomsrolling irrelevant junk and polluting one's mind might possibly be what the majority of smartphone use is for. Hence my distinguishing that from "calling and texting".
I can text my wife when I leave home telling her to meet in the park. I can call for help in an emergency. I can talk to my family, back in my home country, whenever I want and wherever I am. My grandparents emigrated when "seeing your family" meant a month's journey by sea, so I'm quite sensitive to this. It's a miracle we take for granted.
I'll be flying to Edinburgh for the Fringe Festival in a couple of days, and I've been putting together a much better app than the official one. It builds the full catalog of shows as a sqlite database and syncs it to your phone so that you can filter, search, sort, and build a schedule even with the traditionally spotty data during the fest. I also added a bunch of coordination features for planning your Fringe with friends.
Not officially, but I did add the ability to drop shared pins on the map for your friends. I also had that in mind, some of the most fun or wild moments have been on the street.
It's because everything Republicans say is projection. They want to cheat, so accuse the Democrats of doing it first. In actuality it's the current admin that's laying gound-work for election fraud in November.
Not sure what you intend by this, but yes, that’s their goal. The same people put on a “Trump was robbed” act for the Trump voters and a “Trump is robbing you” act for the Democrats, and with both they accomplish their true goal: get Americans to stop believing in democracy.
Time passes. Trump is literally doing his utmost to disenfranchise voters, called electors to personally harass them, and has spent years "investigating the fraud" to setup groundwork for violating people's voting rights.
One side says bullshit, the other side says "look at all of the fucking evidence of your eyes"
Running a performance profile in Chrome doesn't back this up for me, and looking at the loop it looks like it maintains an active `Set()` of which components to update, and clears them out when they stop moving.
Agreed the comments look a bit slop-ish but I don't see anything obviously wrong with its approach, and the core loop is running in microseconds for me when nothing is happening.
The problem isn't doing work on a website, its if you have an idle task that is taking up a significant portion of the frame budget then its easy to have frame drops when you do significant work like clicking, scrolling, browsing.
Idle work showing up in flamecharts is usually the thing to be cautious of.
Zoom in, take a look at what code is running, and you'll see it's all `lottie_light.min.js`. Being offscreen doesn't mean it's doing nothing. In fact, it looks like once it shows once it keeps spinning its RAF loop forever. Shrink your window so it disappears, reload, and then profile.
? In this very particular case, yeah, the original commenter was holding it wrong, as they inspected the wrong thing. People sometimes hold things wrong and it's okay.
For the authors complaints about ads, I recommend paying for ad free versions of things you truly enjoy. Budgeting will mean you consume less and have fewer choices, but enjoy it more. And if something doesn't offer an ad free experience you can pay for, that's a great reason not to use it.