Even with an ad blocker it’s insufferable though. Every time a page ask me to sign up for their stupid newsletter I want to punch a hole in my screen.

I should print this out. I really think this may be a big part of the problem.

Well, yeah it sometimes does happen even if I’m not googling, but it’s nowhere near as exhausting. But I feel like forcing myself to stick to methodically approaches still great advice.

Sub-brain will obey forebrain, I am not offering any choices or debate on the issue. We are standing up now and the feet are walking, the decision is final, now stfu.

I like that. Never really thought of it as a willpower thing. But yeah I think you are right.

I think you are making a good point. For private projects I do in fact programme a lot in go. Sometimes I even pull the plug on my router and use just devdocs.io to get things done. And this does make things at least a lot more bearable. Before I started the post graduate programme I’m currently in I did full stack development for a living in different projects. Usually Spring Boot + either vue, react or angular for frontend. And I 100% agree with you: Spring Boot is just madness. My personal arch enemy is Hibernate though. It’s awesome when it works, but at some point it won’t and then it is absolute hell. Problem is that where I live go jobs are scarce. Virtually everyone here is doing Spring Boot.

I think sometimes I do enjoy bug hunting as well, but only if I didn’t write the bug myself and only if there is no research outside the editor involved. Fixing my own bugs feels like “not progressing” to me. So tell us your secret.

A friend of mine has had a Tuxedo laptop for about 6 years now. Afaik she is rather happy with it, but personally I don’t like it. The fan is extremely loud, the build quality feels rather flimsy and a small 1 foot drop broke the plastic covers at the hinges. But then again, this device is like 6 years old, maybe they are better now.

Well, of course you are right. The problem is that for many people (including me) it is hard to use it in a way that actually brings value, because it is just too easy to spend hours on there without getting anything in return.

I also think that it is highly subjective what can be considered “good” or “bad” content. When it comes to educational content, I also would consider it a waste of time. Sure, if I have a real life problem and the solution happens to be described in a youtube video, there is nothing wrong with watching it. But often times I was just like “Oh, this could be useful at some point in the future” and at the end of the video I could hardly remember what it was about. I also don’t think that “mindless” content is inherently bad. If it helps someone to relax, go for it. I always felt worse afterwards.

Saying youtube would be a big waste of time in general is indeed reductive, but I think for many people it actually is, because it is just not designed to be used to bring you value. The only objective is that you spend as many hours on their platform as possible.

This + DeArrow. DeArrow replaces clickbaity titles and thumbnails with better titles submitted by the community. I wouldn’t ever use youtube without it again. With this setup I don’t even want to watch most videos anymore, which is a good thing, because let’s be real, youtube is a big waste of time.