Why would AliceGG need to reference the paper? Anyone who is vaguely aware of the LLM architecture knows about the paper title and it being a huge advancement in machine learning. This is an article about recommendation algorithms hijacking our attention and LLMs ruining the internet... it's pretty clear the article title is a nod to the paper?

For the same reason that you could tell a joke without feeling the need to explain it.

Given the tone of the blog otherwise, I think it was intended to both grab attention and subtly imply that AI is irrelevant with feigned ignorance.

Machine learning makes the doom scroll more effective/worse. That's the connection I inferred.

That is exactly what the article is about.

On the other hand, the article was exactly what I expected from the title.

Why the 'but'? The article is about becoming intentional in your thoughts and not letting them be hijacked by algorithms.

It was nearly impossible for most people to afford to fill every waking moment with a book in front of them

I'm not sure I agree with that. Public libraries have been around for a very long time, certainly well before the internet. People could get all the books they wanted to read for free. During summer vacations when I was in grade school, I would read multiple books per month, sometimes multiple per week, because we lived close to a public library.

I would argue there is some recency: it used to be the case that editors were working with authors in the sense of building their careers. Not even 10 years ago it could be expected an author might not hit it big until their 3rd or 4th book (George RR Martin was like this) and editors were focused on building the skills of their authors in storytelling. Now editors are also pulled in a billion different directions and work more like project managers on way too many books at a time, and things like typos and whatnot are being introduced into traditionally published books with glossy special edition covers.

I think that may be true, but also a thought terminating cliché.

It can be that most books were low-effort shit, but that the problem has become even worse with time.

I've started avoiding many things created in 2023 or later - you can be pretty sure writing prior to that wasn't some AI slop someone threw together with a half-arsed prompt.

These days I have this vague paranoia that most of what I'm watching, listening to, interacting with is just the product of some meat proxy somewhere trying to put some more half baked crap in front of my eyeballs.

I wish I had a portal to human curated, absolutely non-AI, non-clickbait BS like the very old internet (which still wasn't perfect). I think that dream is effectively dead now. But old books/movies/music are still good. Now I sound like an old grandpa reminiscing about the old days.

Relatively true, but less true every day.

every other modern app tries to claw your eyes out.

They do, and it's annoying that even apps for "real work" do the same thing by flashing notifications/tips in your face, advertising a new feature you don't want to use right now, or warning you that everything is about to break soon.

Single-player games don't have any of these problems except Achievement

Microsoft is still hawking this same beat decades later

I think HN users are usually hostile to committees, even the C++ one!

On the social science side, The Ecology of Attention[1] talks about attention as an ecosystem and the final economic frontier for capitalism. It envisions a world where every moment of our attention is fought over by commercial entities, which feels pretty prescient at the moment.

[1] https://www.perlego.com/book/1536286/the-ecology-of-attentio...

Before recommendation algorithms where a thing, you had to decide what you would be doing on the computer.

This is just the illusion of choice. Not only that attention was already being monetized. Digital advertising didn't start with algorithmic feeds.

Ok but why "find me a book that explains how car insurance works" no find book that explains how car insurance works but find exactly one car insurance company?

...because advertising

I live 20 minutes metro ride away from the best coffee shop the entire Asia Pacific (awarded 2026), Only Coffee Project in Crows Nest, Sydney. And it's really, really good. But that level of quality is not particularly unique here.

Sydney and Melbourne are known to have the best coffee in the world on average. Italian immigrants came over and took what the Italians started and perfected it. McDonald's McCafe was conceptualised and started in Melbourne in 1993, because of Melbourne's strong coffee scene. Australia is the only country that Starbucks failed in, because the coffee here is already too good.

Having said all of this, I still think that about 2/3 of coffee being made by baristas in Sydney is undrinkable. If the beans aren't poor quality or stored incorrectly, the barista will use tap water that is too hard or soft, grind the beans on the wrong setting, over or underextract, overheat the milk until it denatures, not wipe out the previous grind from the portafilter (leading to an ugly, bitter flavour), and do many other little things that ruin the coffee.

I can literally walk into most coffee shops and hear the milk frother "screaming" as the proteins are being denatured. This is the coffee snob capital of the world, and most people still drink terrible coffee without giving it a second thought.

The average consumer doesn't have enough knowledge to have good taste. It's tragic. It sucks. We would have a better world if people cared just a tiny bit more about the things they consume. But they don't, because there isn't enough time and energy in their life to dedicate to truly looking into something.

And this is why I think that there will unfortunately be a demand for AI art. I don't want this to be the case. I hate it. I hope you do too. I hope we all demand higher standards from the art, culture, and goods that we consume.

But as long as people drink bad coffee, they'll read AI slop and recommend it to their friends. It's just how it is.

I actually no joke had the idea of making this in Rust. Basically store snapshots of the history alongside an eventlog (binary file containing compressed chronological input events).

But the problem with this is that someone could write an agent to mimic a human. And if there is a financial incentive to prove that you're not AI, which there always will be, it is inevitable.

I've considered learning to handwrite to write my first drafts like that. But then I could use an AI to generate realistic looking scans of handwriting.

I guess I could physically mail the originals to a third party verifier. That's what it may come down to for creatives.

Forums have their share of negativity too. HN included.

There was always this curve where a forum would be fun because it was a small group of likeminded individuals. And as it got larger, more trolls came in, more newbies with different interests, and others that might not have shared the same cultural mentality that started that forum. And the forum would begin to shed its original members who draw the crowd. Then what’s left is people who have less interest in the community spirit. And that forum starts to shrink again as more people become disinterested and more infighting happens.

Good moderation can help but nonetheless I’ve seen this happen across dozens of forums. In IRC channels, newsgroups and so on too. So it’s not even a phenomena specific to HTTP message boards. Some communities even have a terms for it like “the eternal September”.

To be clear, this is a separate problem to the addictive design of modern platforms. That’s a whole other level negativity. But people seem to forget that the internet could be a cesspit even before Zuckerberg poisoned the well.

Forums were best before up/downvoting/likes/reactions and before sort-by-most-popular became a thing. When they were simply a discussion in historical order (possibly threaded) by topic. HN is halfway down the engagement slope with its voting mechanism, its inability to track which comments you already read, and its locking of discussions after a day or two. The last two points prevent long-form asynchronous discussions. The first prevents a shared and stable discussion order, and diverts attention capacity to giving/receiving up/downvotes and to one’s karma level.

Gottem! Checkmate.

/s

Have you tried only using it through RSS feeds? https://hnrss.github.io/

Likewise with Reddit you can append .rss to get a feed

an infinite feed with a recommendation algorithm is the root of all evil

When you're talking political polarization on a societal level, it's a distinction without a difference. The distinction is that when you personalize by site, it's an explicit coarse-grained choice by the individual. When you personalize by algorithm, it's an implicit fine-grained choice by the individual, which is then aggregated and turned into an explicit stream of content by the algorithm. In both cases, you are adapting the content someone sees by what they want to see.

The sort of national unity that we took for granted between 1945-1995 (and to some extent from 1920-1945) was explicitly manufactured by mass media. Here technology presented the same content to all people, because it was cheaper to do it that way. Before the invention of consumer radios in 1920, we had a similar political polarization as we do today, if not even moreso. Also the Federal government was significantly weaker, lacking even powers like direct taxation, let alone the mass surveillance it has now.

On one hand, you do have a point, if perhaps a somewhat technical one. OTOH, have you seen what passes for political discourse on FB?

Calling it a dumpster fire would be an insult to dumpsters.

Nah, it's just a news aggregator and discussion forum. I'm not here putting my life on display for everyone, and there isn't even a way for me to do that, so it's not social media. Not only do I not have a non-anonymous presence on this site, but there's not even info to link me to one, so it's still not social media... and not even close.

You know what they mean though. Don't be so dense. This feed is not algorithmically built to maximize engagement, and it has no eye-catching and bait-facilitating photos. Meaningfully different.

Ecclesiastes would be an appropriate read.

Our minds seem to be more like LLMs than we probably like to imagine.

In some areas of life, technology and society have forced us to be more aware, of more things, more of the time. Our 'context' is filled with more things to consider, and attention is the window in. Sleep, schedule, and planning, helps to reset us and use context wisely.

Modern life forces a lot of context in, but we still have a lot of control over the rest of our daily 'attention windows' (like cutting out the excessive attention-grabbing media). It's kind of a rigid way to think, but there seems to be something there. We do have a saying afterall: 'what's on your mind?'

I appreciated the article: it was a good reminder to manage time wisely.

I have followed that up with removing all algorithmical feeds from my life (I recommend News Feed Eradicator extension for that) and then setting phone to Focused mode from 9am till 2pm. It's been life changing.

I thought people at work would be mad, but everybody adjusted instantly.

Next up I'd like to pre-plan blocks of focused work - an idea I got from the Deep Work book.

1. Continuous discovery habits by Teresa Torres

2. Life at the speed of play by Mark Pincus

3. The Antidote by Oliver Burkeman

4. Autobiography of a Yogi by Pramahansa Yogananda

The sum total of things going on in the world is far more than any one human being can process. The function of the news media (either human or algorithmic) is to cherry-pick the stories that are presented to users. Because they are cherry-picked, they necessarily present a distorted picture of reality. In the days of the big-3 monopoly of broadcast TV, they were usually cherry-picked to support national unity and common American culture; as the news media got more competitive, they started cherry-picking ones that would hold viewer attention ("if it bleeds, it leads"), and then as we switched to Internet news and algorithmic feeds they are algorithmically chosen to maximize engagement.

Because:

- in bulk, it creates distorted view of reality, by overemphasizing dramatic events;

- individually, approximately half the headlines are bald-faced lies, and the other half merely click bait

- articles usually correct the lies in headlines, but in every case I could independently verify, the text was presenting heavily distorted view of the events

Some of that can be canceled out by following multiple independent sources, but frankly, doing that is IMO one of the biggest ways to waste your life I can think of. Not worth the effort. Meme sites have similar ROI, and are much more fun.

I came to a similar realisation as you and came up with 3 questions I ask when looking at any news article:

- Does this affect me in any way?

- Was this my fault?

- Can I do anything to change this?

I can't see why I should care about any event that doesn't meet a single one of these criteria, yet when I look at the front page of any news site barely any story passes this test

HN is not a general news site. I am also, as you noted, "extremely active". Having conversations in HN comment threads is the diametrical opposite to scrolling through and reading world news and local news every morning and evening.

What's the point though? I'd like to think scrolling HN is healthier than Facebook. But is it better than curated subreddits, or Instagram/TikTok showing you stuff about your friends and hobbies?

I don't think it's pedantic to have a bit of self awareness, although engaging in the discussion instead of writing a pithy one liner would be better.

Basically I agree with your second point. I'd been hung up on the notion that people were maligning specific technical choices (and indeed there are sub-threads where this argument is being advanced), but that's not the case here. Y Combinator's goal with HN is to make money indirectly, by discreetly, almost implicitly advertising itself as an outfit at the centre of things of interest to the "higher end" of the tech field, who might then (a) absorb awareness of it by osmosis and later (b) think of it first when planning their next startup. As such its goals are much more closely aligned with what that crowd enjoys, than with maximising engagement and thus eyeballs on ads.

Everyone being served the same algorithmic results is a genuine technical difference (I believe; do we actually know that HN doesn't customise the front page for logged-in users?). I think it's quite a fine distinction, though -- both sites are trying to hold the user's attention, one just omits to use an available level of customisation. I have no moral objection to either approach.

I cut Facebook a while ago when I realized they wouldn't let me at what I want it for.

I'm glad Facebook told me about my classmate Eddie's death. We would never be friends but we knew each other and my life was better for having him in a class years ago. My only other chance is hope that it is discussed at a class reunion in a few years.

However Facebook wants to give me the 'you won't believe who is harming our children' overblown scare because that is what sells. I need to cut that garbage out of my life (others have discussed why in detail). Realistically Facebook has about five minutes of useful stuff per day, which doesn't make them money. However now I'm out so they get less.

A couple of years ago, I went the indie route (ex big tech). Prior to that I was absolutely allergic to social media and never really used them except maybe LinkedIn.

Sadly as an indie (or frankly anyone these days?) if you don’t have a social media following, you simply don’t exist. Distribution is one of - if not the most - important things to have, so farming social media is unavoidable. The worst part is that you can’t just post and go, these apps (and respective algorithms) expect you to use them regularly for your content to be shown to people.

Automating all of that is also super tricky since there are a billion bots out there. And the alternative being pay-to-win with expensive advertising.

Social media had one benefit: to connect with like-minded people during the madness of the covid era. Ironically, the madness was fed by social media, in part because it allowed groups of like-minded people to connect. Note: this comment holds true no matter which side you considered mad and which side you considered reasonable.

It's not a joke. It's natural fallout from holding AA meetings in a liquor store.

I really liked to read this. i had this idea in mind but its nice to be remind of it

Related : Hister https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49743097

It can be optional. The owner of the website should get to decide what people do with their stuff. They can provide a tracker and (as long as it is alive) chose if to burn its own bandwidth or point you at a seed. [Dynamic] ads can still be inserted and blocked as usual. Should be funny to make money from a website that you don't even host anymore. Default browsers can also respect legal take down orders if they are published on the website.

A whole different world from posts vanishing into the social media memory hole.

There's a lot of reader-mode extensions out there - I'm not sure which ones are good nowadays.

It's not automatic which might be specifically what you're looking for, but I like Tranquility Reader a bit more than the Firefox built in reader

W3C's Amaya browser [1] was as much an editor as it was a browser. Production and consumption were supposed to be symmetrical. This was the promise of the web.

Instead we turned it into a worse version of television, where you still only consume passively what is fed to you while being watched and analysed.

[1] https://dev.w3.org/Amaya/amaya/AmayaPage.html

i had invested a lot into del.icio.us and other similar systems but what really killed bookmarks for me was the instability of URIs and how hard it was to search for the right page based on a title or bookmark name and not the contents. At the time, google was really really effective at search.

I’ve been keeping a spreadsheet of all my fillups. Mostly because I was curious about my monthly spend on gas with it having gone up so much. But it’s been interesting to see the mpg over time.

A friend of mine in high school (2012) was required to add to the notebook his parents kept in the car whenever he got gas. I wonder if his parents still do that kind of record keeping now that the car tells you its MPG, gas price historical data is easily accessible, and card purchases are tagged as "Gas" automatically in the banks that I use.

I do actually audit each transaction in my card statements each month to look briefly at the categories of spending I use most. Gas is a category, but that number doesn't really change my behavior. It's just a data point.

I gave up on my book because after a couple decades I didn't have a good answer. Sure I could brag about the one full-up where I got 57mpg, and I knew about the one where it was only 36 - who cares.

Back in the 1930s the book was probably useful because changes in mpg were a sign you needed to do a tuneup early. But back then everybody knew a tuneup was every few months and once in a while something went off in between. Cars are a lot more reliable.

I did this for a couple of years but after my mileage didn't budge regardless of summer/winter/car age/mechanical work I got bored and stopped recording :-)

Im no fan of Musk but my Tesla app shows me a history of charging, including address. Its kinda neat to have them all in one place.

Captain's Log whether it's a pleaasure craft or not ;)

Settle down Socrates.

As a counter example, a couple days ago I was to install DaVinci Resolve on a new windows installation, so I searched "davinci resolve." Since I was used to having adblocker, I just clicked the top result, which is titled "DaVinci Resolve" but actually takes you to some awful shady thing like wondershare or softonic/uptodown, I forgot.

I just tried this query on chrome / android.

This is the first link on the page at the very top:

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve

(The product page)

The next site listed was Wikipedia.

I don't have any adblockers. I am in the US.

When people tell me this stuff about their Google searches it drives me insane, I want to know why our experiences are so different. It is regional? Is it OS, is it browser, is it something else? I want to know!

This a search domain term that means a search query where the user is trying to find a specific destination/product. I don't know how Google search works, but often a search will first go through an intent classifier and then use a different model based on the query type.

Google isn't trying to sell you the best site. They're trying to sell you – ok well your click to the highest bidder.

Are you sure you don't have any privacy protections enabled?

With my normie setup (logged in account, granted location permissions, no PiHole, no particular anti-tracker mechanisms beyond classic ad blocking), I get decent local results on Google, in contrast to basically any other "privacy focused" search engine.

Chat GPT and Claude seem to be struggling a lot more. I suspect this is because OpenAI and Anthropic aren't talking to the local companies here, and they may have some robots.txt shenanigans going on.

Think of some very fringe group of 0.1%, which you question from time to time how they function/exist/for what purpose. That’s basically how general populace looks at people who go through efforts of de-Googlifying. Stuff that matters to you (privacy, owning your data and etc.) does not matter to super majority of the people, especially outside of the tech circles.

I’m somewhat in-between of two extremes, but in grand scheme of things I don’t really care, as I have completely different priorities in life. Convenience services enable me to focus on those priorities, and I don’t really care about all other stuff to a specific degree.

I’ve been lucky enough to see how people from every walk of life interact with the Internet, and realized the way I function is extremely different. To them, I am the “flat earth weirdo and do stuff differently than the others”.

To give another example - I’m expecting people in HN type about 100 words per minute on average because of our general exposure to coding, typing, internet and etc. That puts us to 99th percentile. Average person does not live like us, nor cares about it.

I lost out on subsidized housing because of Hotmail, but even to this day I still regularly get obvious spam.

Hotmail was great 20+ years ago. Now, it's junk and I only send junk its way.

Yeah, imo the only way this is changing at all is if for some reason organization is inherent to the value offered. I guess Notion kinda did that, Obsidian too.

oh well obviously keeping your stuff in order is an unworkable strategy

Volume makes all the difference. If you could only visit sites you bookmarked first and you had only say 200 bookmark limit, you’d keep your bookmarks in perfect order.

That’s an occupant completely ridiculous proposition in 2024; in 2027 you’ll only need to bookmark the AI chatbot services you pay for, because the rest of the internet will become completely unusable by humans.

Organization (like other hard / unpleasant things) is something that people will do if 1) it helps them and 2) there's no other way.

What tech companies understand well is that if a competitor takes away people's pain and you don't, people will use that competitor.

It was technically possible to copy mp3s one by one to a USB mp3 player, and many people did if they had no other options, but marking an artist in iTunes for sync was a lot easier, so consumers preferred iPods. And managing syncing and purchasing itself was a chore, which Spotify proved was entirely unnecessary to the music listening experience for most people.

Sure, there's a small but loud minority for whom the process of purchasing / organizing music itself is enjoyable, and that minority will often try to push their views on everybody else, but the majority of the population wants a "magic box" where they can type "Taylor Swift" and get Taylor Swift music to play. Or they just want "radio, but without the battery drain, commercials, useless yapping and inability to skip songs they don't like."

No, I was the kid over there playing librarian and sorting all my books and games by author and year. Legos and Knex were also prime sorting targets, but the real joy came from getting random jars of buttons or beads. Getting one of those shelves with 100 tiny drawers was like a recipe for heaven.

I use Innoreader as a database of websites/blogposts I want to reference or read again later.

I only use it to bookmark it into the database so I can search it up later.

Firefox had a tool partnership with an app that did exactly this, but unfortunately it was put in the grave last year (now I know why).

Why should kids put away their toys first?

Isn’t it more optimal, from the perspective of play, to have them spread out?

I can see the argument that if you clear your desk, you’ll be more inclined to draw because you have the space. But if I didn’t impose that value, they wouldn’t necessarily draw. They’d just play with something else.

I don’t track my fuel usage. I did once. Economically, I don’t need to. The car tells me my MPG anyway, literally, if I care to look.

Accounts are harder to track now, with fewer physical assets and more renting and subscriptions.

The point you make seems to be that rigidity in the system would bring value. But I think the values people have often exist outside the system. The system is imposing an idea of what is worth tracking or organising in the first place.

Oddly, I think LLMs are quite intentional in their current incarnation. You start with an empty input box, state a curiosity, and go looking for information. There’s very little imposed structure around what you should care about.

That changes once OpenAI et al. start tracking what you do and recommending what you should be looking at before you’ve even formed the intention yourself.

Same! When I started driving I continued the trend until I got an app that did it for me, then cars started doing it for me, then I switched to an EV and it does some calculations that I never bothered trying to understand.

I personally dont usually use bookmarks unless its something truly obscure that I may want to refer to later (like an article or something.)

I like the concept of indices but a lot of indices i see (like in textbooks) are incomplete. I have to think "ok what might be related to this?" And it certainly is not an easy problem!

I use Chrome at work and Firefox at home, and I still bookmark on both. It never occurred to me to not.

There are aptitude tests for those two traits: Analytical Reasoning and Ideaphoria at Johnson O'Connor. You, like me, probably will score high on both.

Gen Alpha kid don't say 'look up', they say 'search up'

So true!

However we've now got local AI to do it for us:

https://github.com/corv89/rookmark

most humans are allergic to having to do bookkeeping and cleanup tasks that are incidental to what they really want to do.

Yes, and that's IMO perfectly understandable. What was that greeting card text? "A clean apartment is a sign of a wasted life."

Not from the US, we didn't have "balancing the checkbook" over here, but watching my parents and grandparents, and trying to mimic them growing up, I have a distinct impression that all that bookkeeping - from budgeting to gas refills to blood pressure measuerments (which my grandfather did diligently in his final decade of life) - was done as much of immediate necessity as it was of habit.

People did their book-keeping by hand because there was no external authoritative source to track it for them, but also because they needed to know - there were consequences for not knowing some numbers or their history on-demand. As soon as either becomes false, people stop. Very few people I know "keep books" for their individual spending - and it's not because auto-pay, it's because the bank gives you that information for free, effortlessly, in near real-time. The bank is now the authoritative source of how much money you have.

(That's the "external authoritative source". Auto-pay is a masssive QoL improver, but it's a consequence, not cause. The cause here is achieving "not really needing to know" by keeping your earnings higher than spendings. Then you literally don't need to care about money day-to-day, and only check balance when you're planning larger purchases - and only then, manually paying bills becomes "a sign of a wasted life".)

A lot of Zoomer computer users don't even know what files and folders are, they just use apps, which take them straight to what they want to do and don't offer things like possession of your own data.

That's a problem - but zooming out a bit, back to "bookmarks", the problem is that sometimes you need to do some book-keeping yourself - you may have your own reasons to need to know, and there is no authority other than you. Unfortunately, it turns out, modern software is then useless, because it doesn't stop at not requiring users to keep things tidy - it purposefully doesn't ship the necessary tools and affordances to keep things tidy.

I strongly disagree with this. In fact, of the many sins of Apple, removing files from iOS as concept is probably my largest pet peeve.

Most people don't have a problem with files. You learn what a file is in your first computer class day and you're done with it.

Files are not just about organization, primarily, they are the fundamental unit of information. They decouple data storage from processing, transformation, and transfer. It's how we give physicality to information. They give the user freedom in multiple ways:

- Freedom to open the file with whatever program I want, allowing me to experience it however (with a player), but also to create derivative works (in an editor).

- Freedom to store the file wherever I want, both locally or remotely.

- Freedom to share the files with others, via whatever mechanism I want.

Without files, computing is just about individual consumption. You don't own anything. That song you bought? You don't own it, it's some kind of abstract entity in Apple Music. The only thing you can do with it is press play. Living in an OS without files is like living in an universe where everything is liquid and containers of any kind are forbidden, all you can do is open the tap and drink straight from the stream.

Even if you create something? It's locked in some kind of vacuum that Apple controls. Wanna back it up? Pay Apple for Apple cloud. Wanna share it with someone? Figure it out, probably step one is to ask them to buy an Apple device.

I laugh whenever people say that Apple is "easier". The contortions I've seen people do just to get stuff from one device to another even within their own ecosystem.

The tragedy of all of this is that people that live in mobile are becoming less capable with technology over time. People talk of "the digital native" generation but kids these days know way less capable with machines than their parents. It used to be that everyone and their cousin knew how to use a P2P program, to burn a CD, to use external drives. Now you ask someone to send you some trip pictures and they'll just WhatsApp them to you. If you ask them to send you the high res originals they look at you with amazement: files? formats? compression? what's that???

It feels kind of weird to me that we never got "a search engine for your entire personal life", or the same idea for corporate intranets.

Spotlight tried but didn't seem to get very far, and after the mobile revolution, nobody else could due to all the sandboxing.

I guess the fact that it's very easy to search the open web (and very hard to search things behind login walls efficiently) is also a partial cause.

When `Cache-Control: max-age` expires a new copy should be fetched. Old version can be versioned by date.

I am pretty sure early versions of the Safari browser (in the 2000s) did in fact store a full-text version of every webpage in the history and allow you to search that. I even remember looking at the plist files where Safari stored all the extracted text.

I relied on that a lot until one day a random system update deleted all my old browsing history.

Then there was the endless attempts at the "semantic web"

But today you can just say: "Agent, please record all my page visits. Store the page texts in a file. When I do a search, ... etc."

Same. Works 95% if the time, which is more than enough for me. Even made me read, and organize more.

I have this with websites I read a few months ago, stuff from 1993 that is still alive is pure luck at this point. Nothing more frustrating than wanting to share a link with a colleague that you have seen recently and remember a couple of cribs from but that doesn't stand out enough in the history to ring a bell.

I tried it after seeing that link here and it's been really useful. I happened to find myself in the type of situation where I'd need such a system after a couple days and it managed to keep the (volatile) info I wanted. Good stuff!

Back in 2012 I switched almost entirely from bookmarking to web clipping into Evernote, which has been great. Evernote itself has gone downhill, and at some point soon I'll probably migrate my collection to Obsidian (which has its own web clipper), but I'm still a big advocate of the general practice. It is indeed great to have a searchable record of stuff you've bookmarked vs just a tree of links that you'll soon forget exist.

"The Mosaic browser (1993) had full text history search."

The earlier CERN, later W3C, LineMode browser, named "www", also kept a full text history by default

Each website gets a separate folder, e.g., "308" in the example below

An .index file contains a log of all requested URLs with timestamps

   /tmp/w3c-cache/.index

Pages are cached in temp files, e.g.,

   /tmp/w3c-cache/308/temp_lbAfil

HTTP response headers are stored in .meta files

   /tmp/w3c-cache/308/temp_lbAfil.meta 

   grep -r whatever /tmp/w3c-cache

The "www" browser still compiles without errors today along with an assortment of other utilties. I use these with a TLS forward proxy

I use the W3C programs to retrieve HTML but not to view it. For reading HTML I use a contemporary text-only browser

"www" is a 671.0K static binary for me

I'm a text-only browser user for 30+ years so I'm probably biased in favor of text. I routinely save HTML pages from webites I find useful, almost always as plain text. No resources. This makes sesnse for me because plain text is how I search and consume information. Firefox and other popular browsers generally do not save pages as plain text, they have always attempted to save as HTML along with page resources. But I'm not interested in images, fonts, CSS, Javascript, etc. Today I notice some people writing headlless browsers, like h5i, now output pages as markdown or some "machine-readable" format

I use my bookmark tab. I am not particularly interested in storing a copy of almost any of the links I have in my bookmark tab (why would I want a copy of some Grafana instance?)

I do get that for some people it's about research and collecting documents. For me it's basically "quick access to the most recent version of the thing at this URL"

I have a wallabag setup for my interesting bookmarks, and it downloads and indexes the contents of these bookmarks. I read the contents later in a PocketBook, free of distractions from the normal devices. It is a bit of setup work, but just totally frictionless after it was setup. Firefox also has Pocket, which I used before switching to wallabag.

maybe bookmarks and things didn't scale, but The Algorithms can be self-hosted. We just haven't developed the tools.

Shorts aren't all bad. I feel like they've slowly drifted to regular-video length, and the major difference is just the tall aspect ratio.

Same. I don't think I remember the last time I came across actually "FAR right propaganda" recommended by an algorithm. Could be that the author and I differ in what "far right" means.

The only thing I watch on youtube.com is music stuff (electronic, industrial) and occasional tech stuff like some retro computing stuff or such. I very rarely use it. I just went to the home page to see an example because I was curious. One of the recommended videos about 3 rows down? "Donald Trump Recruits Rambo To End The Iran War". It's AI slop. I watch NOTHING about politics or similar on here. Nothing about the US or war things or anything. "The algorithm" is doing exactly what your quoted snippet indicated, scarily enough.

I wrote [something extremely similar](https://blog.scoopy.zone/posts/attention/) a bit ago. It is much harder to accomplish, but like the article says, you can still experience an Internet like the past.

rms (Stallman) used to (still does?) do that where he would download the web requests and emails on a daily basis and then work offline the rest of the day and then sync overnight. At least that's what I remember reading.

I remember thinking about how different that workflow is but it must be incredibly productive. Everything would be lightning fast (even stable Internet isn't always snappy and sometimes it's a chore) and there would basically be zero inline ads or any context switches.

One way to do this is by going mobile-internet only with limited data. It doesn't stop doomscrolling on sites like this, but it does stop TV and online gaming and that could be very helpful for many people.

As logic stands, you couldn't meet a man who's from the future But logic broke; as he appeared, he spoke about the future

[Pre-Chorus] "We're not going to make it," he explained how the end will come "You and me were never meant to be part of the future"

[Chorus] All we have is now All we've ever had is now All we have is now All we'll ever have is now

[Verse 2] I noticed that he had a watch and hat that looked familiar He was me, from a dimension torn free of the future

[Pre-Chorus] "We're not going to make it," he explained how the end will come "You and me were never meant to be part of the future"

[Chorus] All we have is now All we've ever had is now All we have is now All we'll ever have is now

Flaming Lips - All We Have Is Now

For the same reasons we left forums in the first place.

Spam was just a very small part of why people left forums. Size of the community and network effects was one of them. A constant stream of activity on any subject you wanted was yet another. Not having to log in to 40 different places yet another.

I use SelfControl for Mac and set the down time to around 15 days. No Youtube no news sites etc. Except HN. It's helped a lot, after a week you can notice measurable change in attention and habit and productivity. SelfControl lets you add 48 hrs to your blocked time repeatedly, so you can get to a 15 day mark pretty easily through repeated mouse clicks.

I mean it's no different saying a river is inherently bad. We need them for water for survival. What is inherently bad is the maelstrom of a raging torrent seeking to pull you under so no one ever sees your body again. This is what a lot of the platforms have evolved into.

Attention is the axis of reality. Focus on a thing and it gets realer. Ignore a thing and it fades away.

LinkedIn will bury any relevant career news between the opinion of complete strangers. It is surely just a coincidence that those strangers happen to be shilling whatever Microsoft is invested in at the moment.

The browser extension LinkOff makes the feed much more bearable, even useful. [1]

Also, though I dislike the posts that LI pushes into my feed, I've never gotten the sense that this was motivated by a desire to boost Microsoft's investments. Perhaps I just wasn't paying attention, or am not cynical enough?

1: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/linkoff-filter-and-...

stop recommending revanced and use morphe

Addiction is an extreme form of attention grabbing. We've moved from chemical addicticants to informational ones.

I think the funny (and somewhat scary) thing about ad-supported platforms is that both the creators of the platform and the customers implicitly agree that the content just isn't that valuable. They know that if they paywalled the platform and forced people to make that value judgement then barely anyone would pay.

Which is kind of scary where you realise people spend hours and hours each day watching youtube slop, tiktok, instagram reels, while also subconsciously feeling "this content is worthless and I wouldn't pay $10 a month to keep watching it".

Attention is all you _are_

My antidote to this was 100% selfhosting from home as you are now on par with the platforms and have a choice to serve yourself.

You cannot stay focused all day and theres nothing wrong with "just show me random dumb stuff" i mean i wont lie, im old and RTL2 was a thing you know even in educated circles. These no tv people read bad fiction instead.

And i actually kinda like the youtube algo to wind down - but i can also just switch to a timeshift archive.

I think the problem is more that these platforms are reeeally comfortable to use and its not that easy to have the same - doable though.

Oh and btw if you wanna go back to blog circles and xmpp and vpn lan games im all in but times are changing.

I realised this about advertising once when I was listening to the cicadas in summer, brands are like those cicadas, they have to shout louder and louder to be heard, to survive. It’s a tragedy of the commons, and what separates us from the animals is that we do have the ability to reason about it and change it. It doesn’t have to be this way.

I see the same pattern with people on their phones. Opening up an app, immediately switching to the next app, repeat.

I have this same problem. I am not sure if medication will help but I really don't want to go there. My brain is a scattered mess. Even now, I am doing 3 other things at the same time. Is it a matter of "getting good" and just focus? I just don't think there's a secret technique to this.

I think a lot of people struggle with this. Technical work already promoted this kind of behavior since it rewards a very heavy "just in time" lookup style for finding information (we've all had hundreds of chrome tabs open at work before, right?)

And on top of that work chat

And now agents, which are basically all designed for you to spin up several different conversation threads and hop between them constantly while the agent works.

It's no wonder people can't focus. Both work and leisure are basically designed to split up your attention into microscopic fragments.

I play tennis regularly, and I roller skate (inline) regularly. I find that these things provide me a great amount of balance (mentally) as a reminder that 99% of the world is physical / analogue, and that the electronic / digital part is, well, small and unimportant (no matter what is said by those with an axe to grind about the importance of their specific digital service).

I don't read books as regularly as I should, but I always enjoy when I do. I donate plasma once a month and the 'enforced idle time' is perfect for catching up on an hour of reading.

(I'm not very good at either tennis or skating, especially since I've been doing both for 10-odd years, but I enjoy them, they keep me fit, and I'm slowly improving or at least arresting the natural decline that comes with age, and planning on not giving either of them up until I'm literally physically unable to keep doing them)

HN feels a bit like the good old Internet. I hope it keeps being like this, as I feel interactions are nicer and calm here

Ted Nelson apparently predicted it as early as 1965. In his autobiography Possiplex there is a chapter named "My Box of Crayons, 1965", where he shows some of his early sketches, one of which looks just like any ad-infested blogspam website from today. He used it in an ACM presentation, but I can't find it on the web.

yeah same here. I actually don't spend too much time on my phone and I feel pretty smug about it until I realise I just replace the smaller screen with the bigger one a lot of the time :<

From time to time I remind myself of a rule that has worked well for me. I call it 'no idle screentime'. It makes me more cognisant of when I am browsing without purpose or going off on an unhelpful tangent.

Oh funny I thought you were talking about LLMs.

wait till we finally discover that attention is also all we are...!

I hope that soon before we can rename "social media" to "AI media," there will be a renaissance of the old internet, where there's a mainstream desire for human-generated content, life events, and real exchanges with each other.

You don't actually control most of the things in your world. Your neighbour, for instance, isn't a reflection of your preferences and interests.

Also - in your home, it's YOU that's rejigging things. A result of your intent, your actions. Not curated and delivered to you via some corporate monster with a variety of incentives that are directly at odds with yours.

I’m quite happy with RSS Guard. Pleasant and quick to use, plenty of features, and can stay out of your way as much as you like.

But it does feel like intentional doom-scrolling exists, some of it intentional that can be so inspiring. Mainly when I'm keeping in mind "what will I remember", some of it truly stick

It is definitely a XXIst century skill to direct your attention. I am convinced that it is not only by deliberately choosing to be outside the tech bubble, reading paper books or newspapers but also by « pruning » algorithms.

Especially on YouTube that can spiral you on a rabbit hole, it can become a very powerful learning force. I have quite a few friends that became experts in niche subjects by rabbit holing themselves on these topics on YouTube, for example, a serigraphist, a carpenter on Japanese carpenting art or a ceramist.

I think the issue already existed for those who had access to the largest libraries and book stores, only Internet reduced friction, increased span of topics and added video.

Since Da Vinci, it is not possible anymore to have all the knowledge in your mind so focus and attention is the main super power.

I noticed the Tetris effect when watching Lex Fridman interviews with Academics. Every expert saw the universe through that lens and thought it was the most significant and most interesting way to look at everything.

Just saying, the author blames corporate internet and the algorithm that feed you content, but if you browse 2 articles before (this one: https://alicegg.tech/2026/06/12/popular-upcoming) he then praised steam for removing the “upcoming game list” that was purely based on the number of wishlist a game received and is praising the new algorithmic personalized calendar of upcoming “for you”. I find it a bit hypocritical.

People use these algorithms because they love them, and yeah someone posting once every 1 or 2 month is not going to make it in these days and ages. I don’t think the internet became worst, it just adapted to other needs.

I made it 37 words into the article - highlight and search "Tetromino" -> Wikipedia Tetromino -> Alexey Pajitnov -> ...

in-product ads, upsells/ads on their own features and new sub ventures like podcasts, audiobooks and show tickets.

Reminds me very much of this, which I have printed out and placed on my wall at home:

https://www.gurdjieff.org/lannes2.htm

is doomscrolling actually net bad for you? it seems that younger generations (gen alpha) spend disproportionately more time doomscrolling / being iPad kids, but they also seem significantly smarter than older generations.

this might be the correlation causation fallacy, but it seems to me that combining micro-pieces of reality though a continual stream might actually have net positives on information.

I discovered this post not through luck or because of prior (prescient) bookmarking but because a VC decided to build a links aggregator so that techies would hang out on their porch (web property) rather than elsewhere and therefore, would give said VC a chance to invest in their next rocketship.

"There’s one lesson the Tetris effect teaches us: whatever you focus on long enough will end up shaping your thoughts." ---

This should be said more often. In my psychological counseling sessions, I have many victims of porn state that all they think about is you-know-what.

It is def possible. There's a quack on Tiktok claiming ADHD is 'the failure of exec function' and 'no matter what you won't achieve your goals' which is definitely not true. But then he is selling pills, so it makes sense.

ADHD can worsen if:

1. you avoid sunshine and daily walks in nature. 2. don't sleep early and skip morning exercise and breakfast. 3. watch short videos or even long ones for 'fun'.

After taking care of these three, the next step is to claim your attention back by reading long books. It's not that difficult. As all real ADHDs know, even doing toilet needs dopamine and is hard to do (boring). So I place a book on the ledge beside me, and when I toilet, I just read. I've read four such novels in two months now, and all in the toilet!

I discovered now that I can read anything just as fast and my attention stays and my brain works better. Try it. Trollope is great, but only if you're a overthinker like me. I recommend Lewis's "The Monk" if you're into morality/ethics + adventure, or Lermontov's "A hero of our time" if you want to see poetry in prose, and also learn a lot of street wisdom (the kind we ADHDs usually lack). I read both BTW (see my blog for reviews, link on my HN profile).

And finally, don't ever be discouraged. That mental model is easy to fall into, but there are many mental models! :)

Presence and intention are skills–they can be trained

Please tell me how. I need to really really improve myself here. I used to be very good at being disciplined and focused, but being a parent and manager made me an ad-hoc reactive monkey that is always lagging behind with everything and not delivering on type, which I always did some time ago.

(what I'm describing is the first thing linked to on the wikipedia page as a disambiguation)

There was an Australian TV series named The Gruen Transfer on the topic of advertising, which had some really insightful commentary, humour, as well as a regular advertising-insider guy who gave great insights 'from the inside' but was inherently grossly dislikeable in most of the things that he big-upped.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruen_(TV_series)

https://iview.abc.net.au/show/gruen

Related and not related. Fans of https://andymatuschak.org/ might want to know that he is now working at https://x.com/pico, which apparently has the same tagline as this article "Attention is all you have". But really truly don't click that link that site is a hellhole.

(Edit: Wording)

YouTube recommends videos designed to keep us watching

Yes, but you don’t have to subscribe to what it suggests. I keep a carefully curated list of subscriptions and very rarely look at recommendations. That gives me a high-quality filter without all the algorithmic BS.

Interesting thread

Yea, indeed I think we have to proactively keep getting away from doomscrolling/other things which hijack our attention and I don't think it's easy for anyone. It's also not bad if you do it in small doses.

Doomscrolling will make you stay longer and click on a few more ads. I've personally never bought something out of a Google ad. Tbh how much of their effort they're putting into ads, I don't see much interesting ads. If they would try to sell me some tech/hacky stuff, hell yeah. But random ads, nah thanks.

I tend to agree with the post, but narrowly on the hook:

Do you want to listen to music? Just open a Spotify playlist and let the algorithm figure out what you like. Please ignore the AI slop they will insert in between real songs to avoid paying royalties to real artists.

To be honest, my Spotify recommendation algorithm complaint is about the exact opposite, that it’s too conservative in what it suggests. Sometimes I feel stuck in a musical “echo chamber.”

I hear from this post that recommendation algorithms are too broad, but it seems from policymakers the bigger complaint is again the opposite (“echo chambers” and “rabbit holes.”) Not sure which is more compelling, but they are surely not entirely orthogonal features.

After all you’re on this blog, so you probably already have a good idea about it.

Well actually HN recommended it to me...