I had this interesting talk with a close friend who is a therapist about her work with patients on all sorts of addictions. Modern gen-z millennial patients have issues with addictions across the entire gamut from video games to drugs to media to medication, you name it.
Thing about tricks of any kind, like boundaries around when you get the thing is that you don't end up really addressing the root causes of the issue. If you're just locking up your computer or fencing yourself off you're not actually mastering self-control and discipline. If you're handing control to others you're burdening them and messing with your adult relationship. Like it's not healthy imho.
I'm not advocating that you should quit cold turkey or that those methods you describe about not snacking are not worth it. Breaking a real addiction often requires drastic measures. But it's much better to do the actual work on your root emotions to understand yourself. Especially if you're an adult and we're talking about something low-stakes. A part of that involves also accepting that you can let yourself sometimes have the thing and the world won't end.
I deliberately left many social media websites, and I regularly simply uninstall Instagram, video games. But I've also accepted that they're sometimes just fine and I will sporadically hop on them for a couple days. I've noticed their addictive potential is greatly reduced. I've found that rotating and shifting between them makes them more enjoyable but also makes me more dynamic less passive.
For the online world actually participating makes a huge difference. Putting yourself out there, be it typing out a comment or making a video is a much more rewarding experience as opposed to passive consumption.
But yeeah long story short what you really want to work on is the underlying emotions and only you can do that in your mind.
FWIW asking tenants of HN for advice on this is like asking smokers how to stop smoking.
Commenting from neighboring Poland: my sense is that the dark patterns are less a result of deliberate manipulation and more a result of crappy publicly funded tendered software development.
It's, like, when the designs are made in a perpetual bureaucratic Kafkaesque then the results are like this. They're only building to specification, there is no UX research.
You're not going to not take the train. Not like the ticket experience is going to make a big difference with another train provider.
> more a result of crappy publicly funded tendered software development.
I would be more willing to buy that, if their support response would be different, and if it hadn't been an issue for years, including fighting legal battles to keep conditions close to what they are now.
One has to assume they are fully aware and unwilling to improve.
Maturity can be many things, but complaining about internet brownie points is not one of them, at least as far as I'm concerned. People disagree with all kinds of things and that's fine, that comes with the territory of having an opinion.
It's not the same everywhere in the EU, but here in Poland as an establishment owner you have to pay this fee to an agency that purports to represent the musicians. As you describe eg. Spotify in background.
This agency pays out proportionately to registered licensed musicians, but the proportions are calculated in some ridiculous way that doesn't really factor in who's music is played. It means that the only folks who get reasonable payouts from this agency are, like, stars and old hits authors. The ones who's music gets played a lot in radio and other places. Winners take all.
The reality is that a lot of that cash is really for some chums who's job it is to be controllers.
AFAIK the entire scheme is a result of that one and only legacy industry that needs to protect it's interests: football and sports in venues, and maybe music clubs. In practice it means you rarely see TVs in bars the way you do in the US.
I don't think these two are exclusive. The Terry Pratchett quote there at the end of that reads like it's a tounge-in-cheek reduction, with a sense of humor. Obviously we're more complex than that, but sometimes we really are that simple and that's ok too.
I do wholeheartedly agree - personal anegdote: regular live improv comedy has done wonders for my well-being. And one could say this format of spending time with other humans has opened new very personal techniques for self-soothing to me. But it's also assumed this rather consumerist form, almost drug-like, repetitive, formatted, scheduled. It's not, like, a real tribe or anything serious like that. And as it turns out a lot of wonderful human interactions really can be reduced.
Having had earlier personal experiences with substance abuse, and seeing good people go down a lethal path, it's been a discovery to me that adults do this whole self-soothing thing and that it is a skill that they pick up from family and society. All these folks I meet doing improv seem to be getting something similar out of it.
Would make sense if this thread was about laptop purchasing choices.
Surely, there are other places on the internet where NGO's are politely criticized for getting kids the wrong free laptops - those likely contain valuable advice on what brand of computer you can buy
Yeah, the annonying movies IPhone does from my photo library is something I'd love to opt out of. I get that some people love this feature but I don't. And as you say, I could ask the phone to do that for me on request.
You're letting the hype men set the goalposts for you, then, as every ML thing has been retroactively rebranded as "AI."
Remember the term "smart" as applied to any device or software mode that made ~any assumptions beyond "stay on while trigger is held"? "AI" is the new "smart." Even expert systems, decision trees, and fulltext search are "AI" now.
> You're letting the hype men set the goalposts for you, then
Not really, I'm taking the hint. If they call a feature "AI", there's a 99% chance it's empty hype. If they call a feature "machine learning", there may be something useful in there.
Notice how Apple, in this event even, uses the term "machine learning" for some features (like some of their image processing stuff) and "AI" for other features. Their usage of the terms more or less matches my line of features I want and features I don't want.
Well, yeah, Apple is being reasonable now because Apple just got through a big bad PR thing with their recent failed attempt at "AI". Apple are currently trying, as much as possible, to avoid applying the term "AI" to anything.
But that's not true of any other actor in the market. Everyone else — but especially venture-backed companies trying to get/retain investor interest — are still trying to find a justification for calling every single thing they're selling "AI".
(And it's also not even true of Apple themselves as recently as six months ago. They were approaching their marketing this way too, right up until their whole "AI" team crashed and burned.)
Apple-of-H2-2025 is literally the only company your heuristic will actually spit out any useful information for. For everything else, you'll just end up with 100% false positives.
Who said anything about the product's purpose? Excessive use of the term "AI" is a decision of marketing departments, and happens entirely downstream of product design.
The same product could be produced five years ago or today, and the one produced five years ago would not be described as having "AI features", while the one produced today would.
(You can check for yourself: look at the online product listing for any mature "smart" device that got a new rev in the last three years. The Clapper would be described as an "AI" device today.)
> (You can check for yourself: look at the online product listing for any mature "smart" device that got a new rev in the last three years. The Clapper would be described as an "AI" device today.)
And I make an effort to avoid those with "AI" features where practical. I do not need an AI toothbrush.
I don't think it's marketing's primary purpose to be off-putting?
Anyway, it's not the same thing: I'm fine with machine learning to give me better image search results, I'm not fine with machine learning to generate "art" or machine learning to generate text. Everyone has collectively agreed to call the latter "AI" rather than machine learning, so the term is a useful distinction.
it's a misleading distinction that's causing people to spiral out and think they're talking to an actual intelligence and is also being used to bamboozle lawmakers into allowing massive amounts of content theft
Not to be too, um, dismissive, but one of the things we discussed in my 300 level class called _Artificial Intelligence_ in college 2 decades ago was regular expressions, so, that ship has sailed far over the horizon.
Thing about tricks of any kind, like boundaries around when you get the thing is that you don't end up really addressing the root causes of the issue. If you're just locking up your computer or fencing yourself off you're not actually mastering self-control and discipline. If you're handing control to others you're burdening them and messing with your adult relationship. Like it's not healthy imho.
I'm not advocating that you should quit cold turkey or that those methods you describe about not snacking are not worth it. Breaking a real addiction often requires drastic measures. But it's much better to do the actual work on your root emotions to understand yourself. Especially if you're an adult and we're talking about something low-stakes. A part of that involves also accepting that you can let yourself sometimes have the thing and the world won't end.
I deliberately left many social media websites, and I regularly simply uninstall Instagram, video games. But I've also accepted that they're sometimes just fine and I will sporadically hop on them for a couple days. I've noticed their addictive potential is greatly reduced. I've found that rotating and shifting between them makes them more enjoyable but also makes me more dynamic less passive.
For the online world actually participating makes a huge difference. Putting yourself out there, be it typing out a comment or making a video is a much more rewarding experience as opposed to passive consumption.
But yeeah long story short what you really want to work on is the underlying emotions and only you can do that in your mind.
FWIW asking tenants of HN for advice on this is like asking smokers how to stop smoking.
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