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  • Hacker News
  • The one who owns the information owns the world. But with ai slop it became a bit harder to look for an alph.
    by 0xEnsp1re
  • you could also just like being distracted
    by jsisto
  • possibly
    by 4b11b4
  • I think I'm similar. But why didn't people talk about newspaper addiction back then? Sometimes I wonder—even before smartphones, people spent that time reading books, looking up information, and reading newspapers. That kind of addiction was seen as "positive." But in reality, it was probably disrupting daily life too, in its own way.

    When I see things like this, it sometimes occurs to me that the people who create "addiction" are the ones in power. Come to think of it, it makes me wonder why there was never any such thing as newspaper addiction.

    by jdw64
  • But newspapers end and then each one cost money.
    by kelvinjps10
  • Well... https://aeon.co/essays/contagion-poison-trigger-books-have-a...

    and: https://archive.org/details/americannervousn00bearuoft/page/... - one note on this, Beard blamed nervous exhaustion on steam power, the periodical press, the telegraph, the sciences, and uh... the mental activity of women... This excerpt for a tl;dr: https://english.web.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/english/doc...

    For how addiction is defined, google ICD-11, it's: Impaired control over the behavior, the behavior taking increasing priority over other interests and daily activities, and continuation or escalation despite negative consequences, plus distress or functional impairment.. (I'm an alcoholic, 5 years sober)

    by neom
  • You can read a lot of the newspaper and still finish by the end of breakfast.

    It isn't personalized, so many sections aren't of much interest.

    by psyklic
  • It's not information, it's emotion.
    by evolighting
  • Roughly I think is probably in the right direction
    by 4b11b4
  • I thought the font was great.
    by spacedoutman
  • People are complaining at that font should take another look.

    I think there's something maybe special going on there.

    Probably unintentional ... but I swear reading 'word at a time' the words are in a way clearer, like your mind is able to abstract them out of the background.

    Wild!

    And yes, information is 'the thing' but it depends on how it's presented obviously.

    by bluegatty
  • makes me think of https://accelareader.com/
    by jareklupinski

  •     > I'm not addicted to the internet or my smartphone. I'm addicted to information
    You're not the only one. Everybody is like that, I guess.
    by dxxvi
  • I doubt you are addicted to information. I highly suspect like many users of digital technology who are able to consume near infinite streams of said, that you are like a wasteful software program "polling" these data sources hoping that something really important will surface or that some underlying truth will be revealed through identifying patterns in the information.

    I dont think you would need someone to publish that your hair was on fire on the web before you would believe it.

    The wasteful part is that repeating the behavior (addiction or not) can become self-repeating even in the absence of the fix. Also one has to realize that at least in the case of news there is very little every day and most of what is distributed is rehash, or ancillary, or bloated and repeated to sell ads. You can go without watching or consuming news on the internet and not miss much for a pretty long time.

    As far as tech goes, it moves very slow you can take a couple years off a software eng job and come back and not much has changed with very few exceptions. (Yes LLMs were one)

    When you are done staring at your phone/computer at the end of the day reflect on whether or not you got anything really worthwhile out of it and put it in perspective. The signal vs noise ratio is not in your favor and getting less so every day.

    I personally stare at my phone alot for the same reason as many people do. Im bored. But I dont do it at the expense of anything else Id rather do.

    by BatchJob
  • >like a wasteful software program "polling" these data sources hoping that something really important will surface

    This is me on eBay :)

    by panny
  • There’s so much more information to consume than news — or worse, tech news. Every day I find new things to learn about physics, history, geology, paleontology, biology… and not just things we discovered today, but decades and centuries worth of findings.

    There is so much more to learn than any one person could even skim in their lifetime, even if you ignore absolutely all news. And heck yeah, it’s addictive.

    by apothegm
  • This is like saying, "I'm not addicted to smoking, I'm addicted to the happiness cigarettes give me." Addiction is a harmful dependency you pursue to achieve some desired outcome. The harmful dependency is the endless browsing, scrolling, and searching you engage in to obtain it, all the time wasted doing it and doing it in a way that consumes a significant amount of time that could be spent acquiring that same information in a more productive manner.

    That's the addiction, not the information.

    by Maxatar
  • Moreover, the "content" isn't always information. It can be informative and it can be news you need to know about. But it's often garbage, disinformation and the information analogue of empty calories in food.
    by mc32
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopamine

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reward_system

    by toomuchtodo
  • This is like saying, "I'm not addicted to smoking, I'm addicted to the happiness cigarettes give me."

    No, it's like saying you're addicted to nicotine or routine or a break with people, because that's what cigarettes give you and there are other sources of that.

    It is possible to get information from other sources just as it is possible to get nicotine or a break with people from other sources. Because of this your metaphor breaks down.

    by CyberDildonics
  • Also, it's not addiction to information, it's addiction to entertainment. Looking for interesting/fun things is a form of entertainment.
    by ASalazarMX
  • I'm not sure there's always a more efficient way to find that same information. If you already have a question, sure, you can look for an answer. Sometimes you stumble across a post about something you hadn't even thought to look into, though. I think that's part of what he's talking about when he mentions finding things that changed his life.
    by lateatdesk
  • Hey all: "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, [etc...]. They're too common to be interesting."

    https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

    by dang
  • What's the point in linking unreadable website? I just opened it, saisd "Jesus!" and immediately closed it, I like my eyes. People should just flag unereable mess like this.
    by Markoff
  • I think people may disagree with you on what constitutes a tangential annoyance. Is there any point at which the format is, in fact, a legitimate annoyance?
    by clipsy
  • Good dang, you're right but the annoyance with this one is far from tangential or "common"...

    If the site used a black font over black background it would be more readable as I could at least select the text and read it.

    To add insult to injury, the site's name flashes. I'd say that the ONE interesting thing about this link is exactly how exotically bad the presentation is!

    by glimshe
  • Can we add “I think it sounds like AI writing” to the list of off topic tangential annoyances? Clicking into an HN thread and having the top comment being about em dashes or something is obnoxious.
    by acheron
  • Notably, I read this on both my iphone and mac (LG Ultrafine 5k). It is was enjoyable to read in a fun way on my phone, it did not really bug me as a fun blog font. I was more excited about the theme/design than the content. But on my main screen, which is hi res, it _did_ bug my eyes quite a bit. Interesting.
    by cloverich
  • My grandma always had the morning paper delivered. When I stayed with her during the summer I’d start in the top left corner of the first page and read all the way to the bottom right corner of the last and everything in between. What a 10 year old kid got out of the grain report? I’m not sure. But I was amped up on her homemade cinnamon rolls and multiple glasses of orange juice. It was wonderful. These days I’m more selective about what information I take in!
    by CompoundEyes
  • > What a 10 year old kid got out of the grain report?

    ocular pattern recognition, clumping of letters into words, then ideas. vocabulary. grammar. sentence structure.

    reading, especially early, leads to so many good things.

    by m463