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Comment by runjake | Hacker News Reader

I just use an iPhone without the brainrot apps installed. Notifications shut off, except for the essentials.

But I got pretty nostalgic looking at that photo. And I still carry a calculator around.

in my hands, safari is a brainrot app. i can easily while away 3 hours on wikipedia. in my opinion, it's not the apps but the device itself, the shiny-glowing-info-dopamine-device.

Perfect point, if i uninstall one app, I just divert my attention to some other app.

I agree that the phone can draw you in because that is by design.

Where we differ is who’s responsible for what happens next. I am solely responsible for where I spend my attention. The tools I use are: adding friction, disabling the hooks and tactics and changing defaults so that less willpower is required, and, ultimately, if I can't make it work how I want, I get rid of it.

If I feel like something is working against me and I can't remedy that, it's gone.

Yup, just get rid of the apps you don't need, and you remove the problems with smart phones.

Me too. I'm considering getting a camera that isn't the phone. My phone is basically all the various apps that you kind of need to function in Danish society and then I use it to take photos and listen to music and audiobooks. I'm fine with the music/audiobook part being in the phone, but I've really come to dislike taking photos with it. Partly because I have a flip-phone now, since that's what will fit in my pocket, but frankly also because of all the privacy issues with all the things that want to scan my photos.

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