Using an $8 smart outlet to avoid brainrot

One thing that finally worked for me was using: https://one-sec.app/

It basically forces you to do a little breathing exercise before you can visit the site that you have on its block list.

It has been life changing. It adds enough friction for me to stop any impulsive visits but also is not so annoying that I would completely disable it in a weak moment.

One Sec was developed by someone with ADHD, I think and it definitely shows.

It is important to understand that not every solution will work for everyone. There can be many reasons why you struggle with social media addictions. Ultimately those corporations are spending millions and employ state of the art psychological manipulation tactics to keep you engaged so it is important to be kind to yourself. Don't give up. You might find something that works for you.

Can switches like this also detect usage, like current flowing? It might be a fun and healthy twist to plug a walking pad/treadmill into a smart plug and then either make it so brainrot websites are only viewable when the treadmill is being used or make a small app that tracks the time the treadmill is used and then only allows that amount of time on brainrot websites.

At top of my uBlock Origin "My Filters" tab, I have a list of the Web sites like the following, which I comment (by prefixing each line with `!`) and un-comment, as needed.

    ||reddit.com^$important
    ||ycombinator.com^$important

This is sufficient to defeat whatever muscle-memory you have to visit the site.

If your addiction/habit is stronger, you might need to invest that $8.

This would work (even?) better if it wasn’t a switch, but a push button with the unblocking automatically timing out after some interval. Otherwise you’re prone to just letting it stay on unblock.

The Amazon Dash buttons could be hacked to do something like that.

I have been using Foqos app since a month now and it’s been amazing on my iPhone. You can create a block list of apps and when you start “Foqos” those apps will be blocked. You have to unblock before using those apps. But here is the best part. The unblocking can be configured such that it does only when you tap on a NFC tag. I spend a lot of time on the phone as soon as I wake up. So I have been blocking before sleep and keeping the NFC tag in the garage. Amazing setup for me.

This app I assume is exactly like the more mainstream Brick app but this app lets you configure any off the shelf NFC tags which you can get under $5.

This is insanely clever.

I can't use ublock origin for that because I want all devices in my home to take advantage of this, so I've reimplemented this with Home Assistant, Adguard Home and the Adguard Home integration into Home Assistant.

For some reason, I thought this switch altered the electrical power for the router and thus acting as a physical barrier, not allowing it to request those servers. I guess my imagination just went wild.

I also hear that a rubber band on your wrist is useful for addiction.

My anti-distraction setup uses multiple dnsmasqs, one of them has a long list of blocked (ad-)domains, and DNS tags, something like this (1).

So the devices with the "black" tag have a different DNS server (it's the same computer, but it has 2 IPs), and has DNS-level ad-blocking (convenient for phones) and can't access reddit, Twitter, etc. One device doesn't have blocks, in case the aggressive blocking breaks something. I guess it'd be great to use a slow laptop to browse brainrot sites to discourage me from doing so.

(1) https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22467430/dnsmasq-tags-an...

Mullvad VPN's client blocks that stuff as well. That filter prevents me from unknowingly clicking a link here on HN and getting twitter on me.

What prevents you from killing the polling script and editing /etc/hosts back to its original state?

I think a modified Pi-hole would serve this purpose better, as it would leave no other option than getting out of your chair and taking action (assuming you made it impossible to ssh into the device).

The best investment I have ever made was buying a forever license from https://freedom.to/

timed and customizable blocklists, multiple devices

I've never thought of using a smart plug button as a switch to run a script - pretty neat idea I might use for some other projects.

I hope you have more luck than me with sticking with the switch instead of just editing /etc/hosts.

Anyone know the state of IoT buttons? Most seem to have gone out of production. (An outlet seems like a great alternative )

I can imagine that could be nice feature on a router. Trigger fw blocking automatically but to unlock you have to go to the router and press physical button.

I guess I can implement that on raspberry pi.

my problem with things like this is that it's trivially easy to just.. stop the script. What's the point when it adds so little friction?

Instead of adding friction, part of the work of oneself is about finding the root cause of why we go into those places and understand up to which point spending too much time on those is not only detrimental to society but to me personally. I mean, a doctor would tell me that « you have brain rot » would freak me so much that I would do anything to reverse or get rid of it asap. Idk, maybe after +20y of wasting time online I got that it’s a ressource I won’t ever get back and I resent wasting it too much now, which gets me off using all the links he blocked without efforts.

How does this work?

Silly question, but I don't get it. Do you have to get something onto the smart outlet?

ELIF!!!

A timer seems appropriate so it resets itself automatically.

Love the idea! And thanks for sharing the script =)

If editing the hosts file is enough to dissuade you... I'm guessing your not a distributed sysadmin by trade :/

Something that works well is to block websites like YouTube or Instagram in regular browsing but keep them unblocked in Incognito mode. This forces you to sign in every time you want to use these sites.