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Comment by wmitty | Hacker News Reader

My (crude) version of the same thing requires that I go 1000 meters from my house to press the button to enable the DNS for another 30 min of browsing (button is on a custom phone app, distance measured using phone GPS).

One feature that I want to implement is to have the system randomly enable for 10 minutes - and to signal this by changing the color of light from a desk lamp (Phillips Hue). The idea is that when this happens, I would drop what I was doing and leap for my phone to get some bonus browsing in. Me being controlled by the system like this might be fun?, or at least illustrate something?

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Before I read "custom phone app", I was imagining a mysterious physical red button somewhere up a telephone pole you had to climb, which through some abuse-of-job-privileges-or-connections you had wired directly into the telephony wires leading into your house. Or perhaps a comically large high-voltage pull switch labelled "reddit" which sparks a bit for no reason. Maybe a series of such pull switches, one for every major distracting website.

I wish you hadn't clarified.

Just coming here down to note that despite, or because the lizard part, our brains are wonderful creation machines. All the comments up to this parent, including the mysterious physical red button, are great.

On my part, I think the trick is being selective with the addictions we indulge in. Exercise, reading, having sex, cooking, going on walks, writing, 3D modelling. A good mix of addictions is great in life!

That would have been so much better. It would force OP to run back to maximize his browsing time, thus forcing them to exercise a bit.

People who still build magical red buttons and DNS blockers aren't that far gone, they can still build stuff. Most of us are completely paralized on our couches, drooling at the telescreen while a steady dose of soma is administered. Writing a comment is a chore and building a custom app is a distant dream project. We have plenty of daydreams, but are no longer capable of executing them.

I just realized: you did not actually hide some mysterious, physical button somewhere 1000m from your home.

Seems like it would be ineffective while traveling. Unless you could configure it to be 1000 meters from current location! I'm interested in doing something like this. I've been playing way too much Elden Ring this week and I'd like to cut back in general on consumption of anything.

Related to this but somewhat tangentially, I’ve been trying to figure out how I could programmatically determine if I look “busy” and engage Do Not Disturb for a period of time (roughly pomodoro interval) so that emails and alerts can’t distract me. The problem is that when I’m doing rudimentary code my interactions can be rather intense and obvious, but the more technical the problem the more I slow down, mulling things over in my head or wondering why we wrote code this bad and why it hasn’t broken before. I can be pretty deep in thought at this point and not showing my tools much to go off of.

In the end I think just making a pomodoro tool that automatically disables alerts until break is by far a simpler and more accurate prospect.

I have tried a number of similar approaches (pomodoro etc) before which let us to create an extension to auto-toggle notifs when you focus on coding. Works for VS Code so far. Check out https://stateful.com/@sourishkrout & https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=stateful.... If you're on VS Code I'd love to hear what you think.

Wmitty I've dreamed of this. Any chance you want to sell the setup?

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