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I'm not addicted to the internet or my smartphone. I'm addicted to information
- lalith_c 24d agoduh
- oakmad 24d agoThat font will cure my addiction!
- beserkbbbbb 24d ago[dead]
- echelon 24d agoI imagined bad. I couldn't imagine something that bad. It looks gorgeous as an art piece, but it's impossible to read. Form over function to the extreme.
- jasonjmcghee 24d agoJust a small note and I'm guessing this is an intentional aesthetic choice but the chromatic aberration makes the text very uncomfortable to read.
- leftger 24d ago[dead]
- ranger_danger 24d agoreader mode button works wonders for me
- xattt 24d agoCurb cuts for the win!
- deleted 24d ago[deleted]
- NDlurker 24d agoLiterally hurt my eyes. Didn't make it past the first paragraph
- dinobones 24d agoAs someone with keratoconus, I hardly noticed! This is what all text looks like for me.
- someotherperson 24d agoGet some hybrid mini-scleral lenses fitted and your life will improve significantly :)
- itomato 24d ago[flagged]
- jdw64 24d agoI 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.
- psyklic 24d agoYou 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.
- jdw64 24d agoBut when I think about it, communities like HN don't exactly have only the taste I want either, do they? That's always the case, really. There are people whose daily lives fall apart because they read too many books, but that usually isn't categorized as a form of addiction. So sometimes I wonder how addiction is actually defined.
- kelvinjps10 24d agoBut newspapers end and then each one cost money.
- deleted 24d ago[deleted]
- neom 24d agoWell... https://aeon.co/essays/contagion-poison-trigger-books-have-always-been-dangerous https://aeon.co/essays/contagion-poison-trigger-books-have-a... and: https://archive.org/details/americannervousn00bearuoft/page/xii/mode/2up 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/documents/media/aqa_c19th_text_american_nervousness.pdf?time=1556093263781 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)
- Havoc 24d agoThank god for reader mode to unfuck that font
- quasarj 24d agoDamn you beat me to it, I was going to say exactly that. What a nightmare!
- evolighting 24d agoIt's not information, it's emotion.
- 4b11b4 24d agoRoughly I think is probably in the right direction
- Danox 24d agoHA.Ha.Ha. Interesting
- i1856511 24d agoThis is another way to say you have ADHD. (I say this as someone with ADHD behaviors myself)
- Tenemo 24d agoI don't think I've seen a less accessible *font* in my life, including all the dark grey on black and yellow on white ones. Those are hard to read, but this one makes my eyes hurt, they actually started to hurt after I tried reading it despite discomfort. How come? Reading random text for 10 seconds can cause people physical pain? I wear glasses for near-sightedness and slight astigmatism, I wonder if it's related, and if people with 20/20 vision experience it differently.
- arionhardison 24d agoI thought it was me, I literally think there are things that should no longer be acceptable and this font is one of them. It serves no purpose and I would like to ask medical professionals if it is potentially harmful. Edit: While fuzzy or blurry text itself is highly unlikely to trigger an epileptic seizure it is a major cause of optical strain, headaches, and reading barriers across various accessibility needs. Given the amount of screen time we all incur in our daily lives, I do not see why this should be a "thing".
- panny 24d agoYou guys are saying this on a website which puts light grey text on light grey background.
- tomrod 24d agoMy site shows black with yellow background and white text boxes. Highly visible. Maybe you're referring to dead comments? There are options to hide those.
- panny 24d agoI'm sorry, what is your username again? I can't read it, because it's tiny light grey text on a light grey background. Controversy shouldn't give me cataracts either.
- conorcleary 24d ago
- BatchJob 24d agoI 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.
- panny 24d ago>like a wasteful software program "polling" these data sources hoping that something really important will surface This is me on eBay :)
- apothegm 24d agoThere’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.
- bluegatty 24d agoPeople 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.
- jareklupinski 24d agomakes me think of https://accelareader.com/ https://accelareader.com/
- domhudson 24d agoIf this is a marketing stunt to use such a bad font; honestly, I'm impressed.
- Maxatar 24d agoThis 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.
- toomuchtodo 24d agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopamine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopamine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reward_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reward_system
- mc32 24d agoMoreover, 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.
- lateatdesk 24d agoI'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.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 24d agoIf you are browsing, you aren't searching for any specific piece of information. You're just looking at whatever is presented to you via whatever algo in use. In this case reading a book would, IMHO, be better. You stumble across all kinds of interesting pieces of knowledge, thoughtfully written prose, facts (in some books), great stories and characters in other. Though I do now have to condition this with; books written before say 2022 to stay clear of AI slop books that are flooding the space as we speak. Those books are worse than browsing the internet.
- spacedoutman 24d agoI thought the font was great.
- bdangubic 24d agoneither smartphone nor internet will help you get information these days. there is too much of it and anything there is too much of becomes worthless.
- dxxvi 24d ago> 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.
- CompoundEyes 24d agoMy 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!
- nonethewiser 24d agoI remember reading the newspaper in the break room and at lunch. About 2013 or so. That's all their was. Well, for me, because I was a late smartphone adopter. I kind of lump in "internet" (late 90s) with "internet in everyone's pockets at all times". But there was a fairly large gap there. Especially when you consider the limits of 3 and even 4g.
- CompoundEyes 24d agoDo you subscribe now? I’ve toyed with the idea — I think I’d be more aware of local news / serendipitous things I normally wouldn’t seek out. I’ve been considering subscribing to some high quality signal / low to no ad type written publications. Asterisk, IEEE spectrum, NOEMA. Make getting mail fun again.
- Arnt 24d agoI subscribe. There's a newspaper downstairs, I'll fetch it later. The paper news is better than the screen news, and I'm not going to try to explain what better means.
- m463 23d ago> 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.
- nasseri 24d agopossibly the most unreadable website I've ever seen.
- dang 24d agoHey 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- clipsy 24d agoI 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?
- downloadram 24d agotangential and legitimate are not mutually exclusive. the majority of the grievances are infact the latter; they are legitimate what makes them also the former is that (and surely the reason for the rule) is that because these grievances are so commonly expressed when links are shared they create a near constant 'noise' in the signal to noise of each discussion, with signal being the idea or message intended to be shared by the poster rather than the medium it arrived in a better way to discuss the tangent or the medium would be by submitting its own HN post. that way theres a better S/N ratio for everything example: scientific breakthrough is shared on fbook signal: any discussion about that breakthrough or its Nth order effects on anything noise: any discussion about the fbook website, walled gardens, zark muckerburg, anything that would be on any link for that site regardless of the message inside the medium those discussions arent illegitimate, they are better served by targeted discussion on their posts like.. some websites are stylized the point of illegibility fbook website dark patterns popups make alt F4 ..rather than increasing noise across the whole of HN. this rule is closely related to another site rule: "use the best possible interpretation of the parent comment" because it too is a rule that is in place as an attempt to steer toward "curious discussion" (high S/N ratio) ( i will agree in this case the illegibility warrants a comment chain, holy smokes! )
- deleted 24d ago[deleted]
- Markoff 24d ago
- hefner1456 24d agoIf you zoom in its actually 3 fonts. It looks line one of those Lain fan sites. I actually like the font even though my eyes hate it. Its a short read so no biggie. Maybe remove the transparency for a sharper look and make the spacing of the 3 fonts slightly closer to each other.
- karim79 24d agoI feel you. I had to brave through the font that you're using but I feel you. Maybe try to avoid making a statement using a font which literally hurts my eyes, and possibly the eyes of many others. That's messed up. Also information addiction should be a human "feature" I suppose, shouldn't it? Knowledge for the sake of knowledge and so forth. The font is actually cool but it belongs in games like Alien Isolation (and possibly others) it's just not good for blogging methinks.
- kixiQu 24d ago> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html (reader mode works perfectly well on this site afaict)
- deleted 24d ago[deleted]
- CircuitSeuss 24d agoI think parent is within bounds to complain here. This is a pretty horrendous font that is an accessibility issue not just a “tangential annoyance”— this is also a uniquely nauseating multi color font with flicker effects that is both interesting in its own right and hardly common.
- karim79 24d agoI wasn't really complaining. I was responding to the OP. The font thing was just an aside but fine I'll take this into consideration going forward.
- rc5150 24d agoyou shouldn't take it into consideration, they aren't a mod and clearly have nothing better to do with their time. the pedantry on this site sometimes...
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- senectus1 24d ago100% I noticed this about myself about 25 years ago... before the internet really took off on the dopamine rollercoatser it is now.
- abstractspoon 24d agoYou are addicted to avoiding your inner self
- 4b11b4 24d agoProbably this is more precise
- jsisto 24d agoyou could also just like being distracted
- 4b11b4 24d agopossibly
- apothegm 24d agoGood news for those horrified by the font: reader mode seems to work just fine, fwiw.
- 4b11b4 24d agoOn bear blog, how do you utilize this font?
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- 0xEnsp1re 24d agoThe one who owns the information owns the world. But with ai slop it became a bit harder to look for an alph.