I setup a self-hosted FreshRSS + extensions for this very purpose. With a little effort, I can even pull in social media feeds and YouTube subscriptions. Now I have a very plain (but highly functional) UI with a chronological list of the sources I wish to follow. No recommendations, no algorithms, no infinite anything. For discovery, I can now go elsewhere and look for new content with intention, even if facilitated by algorithms. But I've successfully divorced that from the act of consumption.

I can tell you, it feels better. I have experienced what I consider to be a material improvement in consumption habits, and overall mental health.

That is all the more reason to make an effort to break the addiction. That is what people do with nicotine.

I do not know of any countries that have banned nicotine. Almost all countries banned sales to kids from a very long time ago, so that was not what changed.

One thing I remember from looking at the industry (I was an investment analyst back then) about 25 years ago, and from my own observations, is that there was a cultural change. Smoking became uncool, a mark of a lack of education. First in the west, and then later globally. Sales of more expensive brands declined, market share moved to cheap brands.

That motivated people to break their addiction and a lot of people gave up as a result. However, everyone with an addiction had to struggle to break it.

Maybe we need more support for people trying to break their social media addiction. Social media addiction anonymous? I guess it still feels like someone trying to give up smoking when everyone did it.

On the other hand, I would encourage you to try. I am very fond of quoting the serenity prayer, and this is something you can control (although its not easy).

I always put it down to the notifications dragging people in, but maybe something else about the form factor contributes to it.

Maybe this is generational, but I really don't care about the amount of minor jingles and tones I encounter on a daily basis, and I certainly don't see why it's necessary to publish this kind of a hostile rant about it. I guess the writer was trying to be over the top and funny, but really just comes off as unhinged and a bit obsessive, like the type of person you have to walk on eggshells around at work.

I mean, my rice cooker is from Japan and plays "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" when it starts. Was that a requirement of mine when I bought it? No. Does it bother me? Also no. It's kind of cute, actually.

I really enjoyed spending a bit of my morning with these two implementations of the concept.

I prefer your idea of treating the question as a proper puzzle with a 1-submission limit. The "calculator" UI took a whole 2 minutes to understand initially, but I really liked seeing the chain instead of having to mush all the factors in my head.

It's really nice to see the correct answer broken down to get a feel about the real numbers!

The current question's answer seems to contain big errors in magnitude in its factors:

"How many kilograms of skin does a human shed in their lifetime?"

    Skin cells shed per day: 5e8 / day
    Mass of one skin cell: 3e-6 g
    Years in a lifetime: 80 yr
    Grams to kilograms conversion: 1 kg / 1000 g

The final "correct" result is displayed as 44 kg, but these values result in 44,000 kg. It's also odd to show a conversion factor for kg/g, but not day/year.

The first two factors correspond to shedding 1.5 kg/day, which is definitely unrealistic!

> I remember hearing years ago that the ingredients for a strong friendship are (1) serendipitous, unplanned encounters, (2) vulnerability, (3) sustained time spent together. Housemates seem like the only modern avenue to this for adults

The ingredients for a strong friendship are doing things together without forcing it and contact surviving when things change (e.g. geographical move, shared activity ending, family change).

The fact that you needed such a constant school like, unavoidable presence speaks to your own lack of sustained activities and communication in other areas. You haven't made friends through sports, hobbies, shared courses or even work? Only by 24/7 living with them?

You may want to change that. It may seem like it requires more effort at first but it's not that different and lasts beyond the see each other every day phase.

Agreed. I don’t use social media of any kind. Not even on the desktop. I always run with Downtime on. All new apps are disallowed from running or notifying unless I whitelist them explicitly.

You really don’t need this “attention porn” in your life. Just turn it all off. Make friends IRL instead. So worth it.