Basically the internet has gone full circle. It started out pretty shit, got useful for a short time, and is now back to being pretty shit. I don’t use it for much more than emails and banking and occasionally doom scrolling which is becoming less because I find AI generated content so off putting.

I don’t even use generic Google for study purposes any more because so much on there is just AI generated bullshit.

I have apps on my phone that I want to reduce the amount I use them because I end up wasting too much time on them. I then delete them. Only to then download them again later. Then I think, I won’t use this app today, and then accidentally mindlessly open the app while I’m having a moment of boredom and then I’m wasting time again.

What I thought would be cool, is if I could lock the time wasting apps, for say… 8 hours (or whatever time I wanna choose), and then it’s forced down time, it can’t be unlocked any other way than just waiting out the time. It could help break a time wasting habit. Because consciously, I want to use all my time wisely, but I forget these good intentions often.

Does any feature like this exist? If not, is there any way to build this feature into an app to put on your phone to help with regulating phone time?

It might be a dumb idea… but I thought I’d ask the question :)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46471077

Points: 2

# Comments: 3

- The Courage to be Disliked. - Moral Tribes - Crazy like us - Careless People - Madness Made Me - The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion.

And a few that were on my 2025 list that I didn’t make it through, and are on my list for 2026 include: - Team of Rivals - Behave - Why Greatness cannot be planned.

Hopefully I’ll get through those three books before the end of Feb when I go back to Uni, and won’t have time to read for leisure for about 7 months.

Interviewing was different. They asked a lot of weird questions like “if you were a sandwich, what flavour would you be?” And “you need to find out the weight of a boeing 737 but you don’t have scales, how are you going to figure it out?” (I said “I’d just google it”). I was perplexed by these questions and thought I’d bombed out. The other thing they had me do was a 10 minute presentation on why I wanted the job, and what I hoped to gain. Still to this day, I think I did nail the presentation. I kept it clean. A few years after I got my Job, one of the guys on the panel of my interview was talking to me giving me a pep talk for an exam I needed to sit, and I asked him why they asked me those weird questions and he said “we just wanted to see how you’d handle stress and ambiguity” he also told me I did one of the best interviews he’d ever seen. That was pretty good feedback years after the matter but I’m never quite sure if he was just being nice.

In terms of surviving, healthcare especially the area I work in is not for the faint hearted, some days it really is utter carnage and overwhelming. Staff can be arseholes to each other, and management don’t care if you were hoping to go home on time - you’re probably going to stay late. I cope with my job in several ways, some of them consciously others less so. I exercise every day, it helps with my health but also my mood, and gives me time out. I study things that are separate to what I do for work - like planning for a back up career. But at work, I also dissociate, not consciously but I do, I turn off my emotions at work, and I don’t care too much about anything or anyone. It’s not to be unkind, it’s like self preservation or something. I also just treat my work as the money generating goal that it is. My identity, my aspirations, and my self-worth are not tied to my work, work is a thing I do to get money to live. I am no longer as altruistic as I was when I originally went into healthcare.

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

It’s been an interesting experience because I’ve tried to learn coding before got bored way more quickly. This time, the AI suggested I use Swift. I genuinely didn’t know if that was a good or bad suggestion so I went with it.

And it’s taking me AGES is not an efficient way to develop anything! Not even a prototype, but at this stage I don’t have the money to pay anyone to do it for me, so I’ll persevere because I actually genuinely believe in my idea, but I actually am finding it fun and rewarding. Every time I run my code and find it works I get a buzz out of that. And every time AI generates something shit that doesn’t work, I’m forced to actually look at the code and figure out what the problem is, and how to fix it.

Slowly but surely, it’s like… even though I’m doing something in a language I don’t understand, I’m starting to learn what bits of it mean because they either lead to an outcome, or they recur in a similar pattern that my brain goes “oh ok, that’s what that bit of code does”.

It’s probably a terrible way to learn, but I’m still learning. I’m still building an MVP. Even if the whole business idea is a massive failure, I’ve learned a little bit about Swift, I’ve also learned the value of human programmers and I can tell you one thing - if my business is a success and I can get it off the ground, I’ll be investing big time in human programmers and I won’t mind at all if they use AI to assist them if it makes them more efficient on whatever.

I don’t really care if it’s vibe-coding, or AI assisted programming, it’s another way of acquiring a skill, and as far as I can tell, at a minimum it lowers the barrier to entry to coding in an unconventional way.

I’m just trying to get a minimum viable product/prototype together at this stage, so hopefully I can actually pay a programmer (or a few programmers) to make it compatible with as many devices as possible, as well as secure etc. I know as a rookie I absolutely do not have the capacity to build the exact product I’ve got in my mind, but I at least need something tangible to add to my pitch. I appreciate the insight though!