The long-term solution to the never ending distractions is going to be more tech, not less. We are seeing the start of it with Apple building out the focus modes on iOS, but there's lots of ground to cover. Imagine that all the productivity apps, i.e. slack and email, leverage AI to help prioritize and schedule what you need to respond to. For example, you could imagine your inbox giving you one notification after two hours with a prioritized list of emails to respond to. At the end of the week, if you haven't responded or read emails that fit a certain pattern, it will suggest filtering these emails to another folder.
This is a little more complex with social media, where the goal is to drive engagement time as much as possible. Not really sure what would fix this, other than users manually setting up their own screen time limits. Legislation might be able to accomplish something, but that feels very heavy handed and would likely have poor execution considering how out of touch politicians are. Perhaps Apple could build in some OS features that would identify social media addiction and gently nudge users to take breaks.
The dumb phone idea is interesting and highlights how much of a current issue this is, but doesn't feel like a realistic solution for the broader public
This feels like a very tech-industry answer. The solution to too much tech in our lives is more tech? AI? The latter especially I don’t buy. In my experience, apps and services that try to learn your usage patterns rarely do a good job of it. I know there’s really great uses of AI out there, but this idea that we can just sprinkle some AI dust over problems and they’ll be solved, feels like such a tired pitch by now. Often AI turns services into grey boxes that become very frustrating to use when their predictions are wrong. I don’t need to cede even more control of my life to algorithms that are opaque to me and are often trying to monetize me in ways I never consented to.
As far as more tech being more realistic than people opting for dumb phones en masse, you’re probably right, but AI being an actual good solution to tech addiction I disagree.
Although true, I have found it to be frustrating in practice compared to the simplicity of running a standard API locally. I have even seen some people rig their lambdas to accept a boolean param which changes it to a standard server to get around this.
I think lambdas are great but the current tooling needs to advance a bit more for adoption to really take off imo
> At least AWS SAM supports local debugging and testing.
I'm still new to SAM but coming from a more regular style of web development it still feels brutally inefficient.
Changing 1 line of code requires waiting multiple seconds to build + run your new lambda so you can see the changes even with a local invoke of it.
That and if you really want to keep things local you need to mock out all calls to other AWS resources that you might be using in the lambda. Although you'd run into this same problem with a regular style app too.
I'm so glad I don't have to do serverless development full time. Just so happens I'm doing a small service for contract work but yeah, it's like taking 100 steps backwards for development friendliness IMO.
I've tried using LocalStack for mocking AWS services locally, but it's never worked quite the way I want it to. At this point I just set up "local" versions of the resources I need in a non-prod account and set up the service to use those when I'm developing.
The real problem is the development lifecycle for a lambda. It's a constant loop of changing the code, building it and then invoking it. This process takes a bunch of seconds even for the smallest change in a tiny code base.
It's much slower than writing code and immediately going to a browser to reload to see the changes which is something a lot of dev environments were able to pull off since about 1998.
Although this is a real phenomenon, individuals do possess the ability to improve their looks. With maybe a couple exceptions, nearly everyone can become very attractive if they take care of themselves, dress well, and lead a healthy lifestyle.
> nearly everyone can become very attractive if they take care of themselves, dress well, and lead a healthy lifestyle.
You're going to have to define very attractive. No amount of healthy lifestyle will make your breasts bigger. No amount of dressing well will make your face less ugly (short of putting a curtain in front of it).
There are hard limits to what you can do as an individual without surgery. Even with surgery, you still will run into a wall.
Yeah of course those things are out of control. My point is that the things you can control have a huge impact. Maybe you can never be a 10/10 because of some specific flaw, but you could likely be at least an 8. Also flaws tend to be seen more as quirks in more "attractive" people.
I am inclined to agree with you, but as a counterpoint consider that if you're an African-American woman, the cost of adhering to U.S.A beauty standards is high, several hundreds of dollars a month. This is not an exceptional but a considerable minority that can't become 'very attractive' without heavy expense, and can't easily lead a healthy lifestyle when they are priced out of everywhere but places that are food deserts.
As a counterpoint, you have facial scarring, skin conditions, gross asymmetry, bad proportions, bad teeth, nerve damage from Bell's palsy or the like, pigmentation problems, and so on to more or less obliterate the "nearly everyone" bit.
I guess I should have been more specific, how about 95%+ of the population? I just more often than not hear this line of thinking from people who definitely could look better but choose not to put in the effort to do so. In general I do agree its a problem, but its one people have actual agency over.
Really cool idea! I've tried the zoom breakout rooms, and they get the job done for my use case, but its a bit clunky and doesn't seem to support shuffling of groups at a regular interval
Thank you! That's good feedback on the Zoom breakout rooms – it is more aimed toward the enterprise but I was thinking something like this might also be useful for workshops where you want to disperse people at those regular intervals. Obviously not the primary audience though since there are enterprise tools in that space.
Yeah there are definitely a number of limitations if you are using just alpaca (which I limited myself to for this), which is why this project is intended for just a few basic use cases.
Heard about alpaca a while back, so I made this as a small fun side project. The main features are buying, selling, and viewing stocks. In the future I may add additional features if I find something I want to add (or others want to add).
Been working on a CLI tool for stock trading since I tried to look for one and it doesn't seem to exist. Was also a fun excuse to get more experience with Go and try out the Cobra library.
Besides that, lots of more involved cooking and baking projects to fill the time. I'll come out of this ready to be a stay at home dad!
It's pretty simple, it uses alpaca as the brokerage account and will support buying, selling, and viewing stocks. Any other features I'll add later based on feedback/my own experience.
Not quite ready to put out the repo link publicly but you can email me at andrewnegri1 [at] gmail [dot] com and I can send it to you
This is a little more complex with social media, where the goal is to drive engagement time as much as possible. Not really sure what would fix this, other than users manually setting up their own screen time limits. Legislation might be able to accomplish something, but that feels very heavy handed and would likely have poor execution considering how out of touch politicians are. Perhaps Apple could build in some OS features that would identify social media addiction and gently nudge users to take breaks.
The dumb phone idea is interesting and highlights how much of a current issue this is, but doesn't feel like a realistic solution for the broader public