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!

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

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.

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.

    > I'm not addicted to the internet or my smartphone. I'm addicted to information

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.

I thought the font was great.

It's not information, it's emotion.

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.

you could also just like being distracted

You are addicted to avoiding your inner self

100%

I noticed this about myself about 25 years ago... before the internet really took off on the dopamine rollercoatser it is now.

HA.Ha.Ha. Interesting

neither 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.

This is another way to say you have ADHD. (I say this as someone with ADHD behaviors myself)

I 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.

I 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.

Just a small note and I'm guessing this is an intentional aesthetic choice but the chromatic aberration makes the text very uncomfortable to read.

That font will cure my addiction!

Good news for those horrified by the font: reader mode seems to work just fine, fwiw.

Thank god for reader mode to unfuck that font

If this is a marketing stunt to use such a bad font; honestly, I'm impressed.

possibly the most unreadable website I've ever seen.

duh

On bear blog, how do you utilize this font?

If 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.