iPhone dumbphone
44 points by adampetrovic
44 points by adampetrovic
Whenever I need some information, I can just ask my LLM, and it can give me a distraction free summary. It helps the long-tail of weird situations too: for example if someone asks me to take a look at a website, I can ask my LLM to scrape it and summarize the details for me. It’s pretty hard to get distracted this way.
Overall the author has a pretty good take, but this part right here makes me want to fucking vomit.
It's extreme, but it's also a pretty natural outgrowth of the same avoid-human-interaction-at-all-costs ethos from the rest of the post.
I’m not the author of the post, but I submitted it because I’ve been using almost exactly this approach for the last six months, and it has been the most effective thing I’ve tried for reducing phone distraction.
I’ve probably tried ten or so variants of this over the years: Screen Time limits, deleting apps, blocking apps, grayscale, separate devices, various “dumbphone” experiments, etc. Most of them either had too little friction, so I worked around them, or too much friction, so I eventually abandoned them.
Apple Configurator has hit a surprisingly good middle ground. My phone is still useful, but no longer feels like an infinite slot machine. I keep the App Store unavailable day to day, and sure the friction of plugging my phone in to my laptop and removing the profile isn't that great, its large enough that I can repel it without reverting back to old habits.
If only apple configurator didn't require a macbook. Or a factory reset.
AFAIK, it only requires a factory reset if you MDM enroll the device. You can install profiles to non MDM devices without a reset! Those profiles don't allow as much as MDM profiles, but it's enough for lots of restrictions.
Well if I only want to enforce screen time restrictions without it being easily bypassable (the simple solution of course being just having a friend set the passcode, but that comes with its own issues) that sounds like just what I need.
This sort of thing never ended up working for me because I always just accessed everything via the web browser. Brick has been very helpful though
With the approach described in the post you can have an allow-list of websites and everything else will be blocked
Yeah, but having the whole internet is really useful, but only really when I'm at home and need to look up something random like a manual or a recipe, so having the ability to temporarily unbrick my phone only at home is much more convenient
You can also do the inverse. I have a set of 10 distracting websites blocked (news, x, instagram etc), everything else is allowed.
If you're willing to reset your phone anyway, another approach is to make a brand new email account for your phone and tell it your birthday was child-age amount of years ago. Then, child lock your phone. You can pick and choose what apps (and even what websites!) are installable and usable. This works for both iOS and Android.
(I've been doing this for a few years now)