Yes. They run public DERP servers. I'm no longer on an ISP with CGNAT, but never had an issue - marginally (like 10%?) throughput penalty, but not enough to notice with only a few users. I understand you can run your own DERP, though I never had the need, and it Just Worked.
Would you mind pointing me at the research you found? I've been looking for studies that correlated hypoxia and autism (and related interventions that might help) but I haven't been successful.
I can't really. I used a Raspberry Pi 4 and later a 5, I used Canakits which provided approved power supplies for both, I used the highest-end SD cards I could get and then later used a special case/hat to instead use an NVME stick for storage. None of these were reliable.
I bet you could make a small book of all the times I've said this online and then had multiple people tell me "I'm running my whole life on a RPi v1, you're crazy, they are rock solid" (also people agreeing with me), I'm here to tell you I've spent literally hundreds of dollars following all the recommended guides and I've come to the conclusion that RPis are crap. I've owned every one of them from the original B-style one (I still have it) up to the 5th gen with the highest ram, I do not like them and I won't be buying them going forward.
> Is it the SD cards, or something else?
I have no clue, I'm sure it was the SD card at least one of the many times but it wasn't always something obvious. Sometimes the RPi would just lock up, no ssh, no ping, no web interface, and I'd have to power-cycle it to get it back up. I got tired of doing that and finally bought a BeeLink and it's been smooth sailing since then.
There are certain genetic markers you can test for, but not all forms of autism appear in the tests we have today.
Then there's things like the folate blocking antibody (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4783401/) which you can do a blood test for, but again not all people with autism have the antibody.
I've been trying to do this too - paring down distracting apps, leaving only essentials like communication, maps, uber, etc. But my problem is what to do about the browser? I feel it's too essential to the "long tail" of uses (as the author put it), but also among the most distracting apps on my phone.
Something I've recently played with is a very 'dumb' android browser [0] able only to open and share links (and refresh the webpage), nothing else. Since I don't trust myself that I won't just click links from page to page I also configured the webview's client to disable links [1]. From this, you may be able to restrict yourself as much as you can since you could set a whitelist set of links you find 'indispensable'.
If on Android, you can propably use something like rethinkdns and just block the worst timewasting websites for a while. Once you get used to not accessing reddit, youtube, prawnhub, whatever your poison is, the browser becomes boring again.
What works for me, and this might not be palatable to everyone, is to intentionally downgrade my phone to a worse experience to add friction. I am currently using an SE 2020 on purpose. This thing overheats like hell, if I try to do anything too intensive with it it starts stuttering like crazy. But that's actually perfect, it's what I want. It naturally reduces my use time because it can get annoying to use.
One thing I sense the author is ignoring is the pretty LARGE swath of third party apps that do something of the like but in a much more user-friendly form factor. Most are targeted towards parents and teens, but surely there's no reason you basically couldn't use it on yourself. I'm thinking of things like Qustodio and the like. It should still allow you to massively restrict the iPhone, there's a little bit of friction involved with undoing it -- but not as insane as the entire iPhone reset -- and you can much more easily on the fly make custom changes to it as you go about it. I'd probably spring for something like that if I found screen time or self-control to be an issue before going full-in on something like configurator which I think would be very, very hard to iterate settings with.
I've been doing what the author did for about a year using Configurator. I have the browser blocked completely. I found that I could still get around it by sending messages to myself in apps like Messenger and using the built-in browser.
So I ended up using an allow list for internet traffic with nothing allowed, which stopped that. What do you find you need the browser for?
In the UK it has become very common to need to scan a QR code on your table to order at a restaurant, which takes you to a website.
Most certainly you can still order at the bar the old fashioned way, but since COVID, physical menus have been removed, so how is your group meant to decide what it wants to order before one of you goes up on its behalf? (You cannot all go up if you want to hold the table.)
I don't even particularly mind the experience of using the website; the interface enables the display of all ingredients & allows you to specify allergens they need to avoid. If the kitchen runs out of an item, they can mark it as unavailable in the webpage. Finally, fighting to order at a busy bar was never a fun experience to begin with (it is the norm in non-fine-dining experiences in the UK to not have your order taken at your table.) But, this does require you allow arbitrary internet access on your device, which complexifies the blocking situation.
Yes it's exactly the one-off situations like that, which aren't super often but occur enough to greatly inconvenience someone without a pocket browser.
The pattern that finally seems to work for me is to use Freedom to block all scrolly crap specifically on mobile. If I want to dig through YouTube or look something up on Reddit that’s fine, but I have to physically go to a machine that’s not always in my pocket.
At least so far I don’t need any of the things I’ve blocked on the go.
i've been using the blank spaces launcher for this. it has its flaws for sure, but the feature most useful for the scenario you describe is the "Lock Distractions" feature. In order to use safari, you have to go through a "mindfulness" exercise, and then you can unlock safari for a small amount of time (1 minute, 5 minutes, up to 20). I find this is just enough to keep me out of random wikipedia pages all day, but still allows me to pull up a webpage when i need to do some very specific task (like unsubscribe from an email list).
A small lock on the browser, something as simple as the math problems some people use to stop their alarm in the morning might be a sufficient stopgap from mindless browser use.
I vaguely remember someone here saying what worked for them was to add a fair amount of artificial lag to browsing, so that loading a page would actually be painfully slow.
I find the mobile web is doing a great job of destroying the addictiveness of the browser. I use an se2 so not terribly old. new reddit doesn't really work at all on it. old reddit just barely. Most other websites seem to hang after trying to load all the adware and never return the full content anymore. Some mobile websites just flat out don't load at all anymore, just a white screen like the phone rolled over and gave up.
Hacker news is about the only website that works. But, once you find a couple threads you are interested in you are rate limited from replying before long and that frustration kicks me off it until days later potentially.
- Money (the concept) is useful to society as a store of value, so you don't have to waste effort bartering for things.
- Adding on to that, credit is useful to society since it lets humanity even more efficiently allocate its good and labor (stored as money).
- Finally, stocks, insurance, and other financial instruments are additional advanced developments on top of credit, where groups of humans (companies) can take on even more risky endeavors supported by investors or insurers.
So my view is companies like Jane Street facilitate these complicated value transfers, to let (e.g.) a spaceship company draw on resources generated by growing crops, selling shoes, giving haircuts, etc via a convoluted path through stocks, ETFs, whatever.
I think Git was initially more popular and that had compounding effects that made it eclipse Mercurial.
In 2010 or so we tried to adopt Mercurial at the small company I worked at, but the support for Git was just so much better - even back then. Git's popularity meant that tooling, documentation, and general ease of finding people to ask questions was 100x easier with Git, so we switched. I'd imagine the same thing played out many times over.
A few FAANGs did and still use Mercurial, but they're on their own islands and don't really affect the wider tech ecosystem.
Circa ~2007/8 they were both very much on equal footing as far as popularity with individual engineers goes. The Linux kernel being on Git gave it an allure to most that Mercurial never had, but it was GitHub’s ascendancy that really started to put distance between the two.
I'm self hosting Readeck (https://readeck.org/en/) and I really like it. It's nicer than Pocket was, the website extraction seems to work better, and it can't ever be shut down.
For my Kobo, I wrote a mod that lets me redirect Pocket API requests, and a small proxy server that translates Pocket API calls into Readeck calls.
So far it's working flawlessly and my Kobo is using its built in Pocket viewer for Readeck instead. I'm hoping to open source it soon so others can use it.
My company moved EiBs of data off of tape a few years ago. It was reliable and durable, but the problem was read speed.
It took so long to move tapes around and read the sequentially (no random access!), and as the data corpus grew it got harder to have a practical backup, even though the data was still theoretically extant.
Do you think it's possible to make GUI software with a Unix philosophy? Specifically piping together small programs seems natural in a shell but I've struggled to figure out how it could work for GUI apps.
