Oh I mean, they certainly never invited us to take their eggs. But their pecks of protest were generally easy to ignore. 😅 The more vicious hens required more creative solutions.

I used to help raise and tend to chickens during my childhood. As adults chickens have an outer layer of stiff feathers on their wings and back which mainly function as protection against moisture and enhance mobility (fluttering, gliding, etc.), but beneath this layer there’s a layer of very soft down feathers which offer insulation against the cold. It’s best to feel how soft their down feathers are when they’re chicks, as their stiffer feathers haven’t grown in yet, but also if you spend a lot of time reaching under hens for their eggs you’ll find that their undersides still have a lot of softer feathers for nesting purposes.

I am quite sure I have ADHD (though not officially diagnosed), with that in mind here’s my story.

There’s a veritable cornucopia of programs and systems available to utilize when it comes to keeping digital notes, and none of them stick for me. I desperately want them to work, because I loathe writing things by hand due to hand cramps and poor penmanship. The thing I get hung up on a lot is getting comfortable in a certain software-based note-taking ecosystem and then running straight into a wall when I want it to do one particular thing I’ve identified as being useful, or perhaps the software just becomes unreliable for one reason or another. It’s highly demotivating to me when I realize I’ve spent hours using something only for it to end up not working for me the way I wanted it to. Also, when I write digital notes, I have a very bad habit of editing, as if someone other than myself were to read my notes later (irrational, I know), so the process takes much longer than if I were to put the pen to paper.

The thing about pen and paper is, it just works. I might run out of paper or ink, but assuming I have access to more, I can write whatever and however I want. Sure, I don’t get automation or full-text search “out of the box”, but I can devise my own systems (short-hand, indexing, etc.) or borrow someone else’s (Bullet Journal), even use external tools (scan document | OCR) to meet my needs when the time comes.

Right now I’m in the middle of building a habit of keeping a small journal on my person where I keep very simple remarks about my day and track personal tasks and events. I’m explicitly only using systems that I find useful and nearly effortless, but as I improve the habit I will try adding more complexity. I feel that if I can develop a solid core of analog writing, then it’s likely I can begin to introduce more regular digital note-taking to augment this core practice.

I don’t believe there is one method that works (or is even beneficial) for everyone, rather I think it’s more important for individuals to find a method (or hybrid) that works for them, and stick to it.

I was digging through the comments for exactly this, thanks!

Yeah, I’ve felt this at times, but games are meant to be fun and low stakes. If certain games make you feel this way I think it’s worth reflecting on what about the game triggers this response. Perhaps there’s a way to avoid that thing or reframe your thinking around it. Otherwise, there’s no shame in not playing a game that makes you feel bad!

ChatGPT is human enough sounding for the registration forms. I’ve got no idea why folks think this is the end-all solution when it could be faked just as easily.

A simple deterrent for this could be to “hide” some information in the rules and request that information in the registration form. Not only are you ensuring that your users have at least skimmed the rules, you’re also raising the bar of difficulty for spammers using LLMs to generate human-sounding applications for your instance. Granted it’s only a minor deterrent, this does nothing if the adversary is highly motivated, but then again the same can be said of a lot of anti-spammer solutions. :)

Congrats on graduating and landing a full-time job! 🎉

As an RSS-enjoyer perhaps you can help me. I want to get better about using RSS to stay connected and updated with the world. Right now I’m using Feeder for Android and I’ve got some feeds from a couple news publications, some Rust dev feeds, and some of my favorite podcasts, but I find that I get little value out of this. Do you have any recommendations on how to squeeze the most out of RSS? How do you decide what’s worthwhile to subscribe to?

I’ve been doing a lot of software interview prep, so much that I haven’t done any “real” programming in a minute, which I miss. I don’t really have any ongoing side projects at the moment so I’ve just been coming up with ideas and seeing how far I can scope them out before running into a wall. So far it’s been mostly walls.

I’ve also been working towards getting myself medical coverage so I can get officially diagnosed with ADHD (or whatever I’ve got going on) and hopefully get on some medication. I’ve just been really feeling the struggle these days and I know I can’t put off learning how to live with the way my brain works any longer, especially through the bleak slog that is the job hunt in 2023.

There’s that “just” again. :)

buy and mail checks, balance your checkbook, and go in person to buy things, go to the bank, or get service

It’s simply unrealistic to expect your average American to add all of this (and much more) to their routine and expect the benefit of ditching the smartphone to somehow outweigh the additional time and energy investment. Going in-person for anything in an average American city these days is far more of a hassle than it was “back then”. This is at least partially due to the fact that our cities are built with cars in mind and not people, but that’s a rant for another day.

I’m not sure what can be done on a smartphone that cannot be done on a computer.

Basically any form of two-factor authentication which is becoming increasingly more common and necessary for the average user to access anything from banking to employee services. Sure there are desktop 2FA programs that you can use in certain scenarios, but using these is often bad practice and defeats the purpose of even having 2FA in the first place.

Certain food or delivery services require you to use a mobile app to interact with them. Whether or not these services are essential or not depends entirely on the needs and circumstances of the individual.

I know you mean well but this is kind of a privileged take. Not everyone who wants to disconnect can afford to. It’s kind of like how many people can’t afford to just not use the internet, without it they will likely lose access to many essential resources.

“Just” not using a smartphone is viable for an increasingly vanishing portion of the population, in the US at least.