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This is a very unexpected way to try combatting addiction. I don't know how well it will work, but I will consider it.


Negative reinforcement. There's a strategy for smoking where you put a wad of hair in your cigarettes. I used nicotine patches myself, so I can't speak to the efficacy.


Nit: that's not what negative reinforcement means. Negative reinforcement is about removing a negative stimulus, like inducing someone to go to a desirable website by improving their initially bad text contrast whenever they go there.

In this case, jumpscaring yourself would just be considered punishment (or "positive punishment").


To re-frame it as a list of combinations:

* Positive reinforcement: [Adding] something so that entity does the action [more]

* Negative reinforcement: [Removing] something so that entity does the action [more]

* Positive punishment: [Adding] something so that entity does the action [less]

* Negative punishment: [Removing] something so that entity does the action [less]

P.S.: Note that this intentionally avoids diving into exactly how the Entity judges the Something. It's not always clear, even if in many cases you can guess.


P.S.: Sharing a book-quote that seems apropos, particularly the final two lines.

> People came, and tormented a nameless thing without boundaries, and went away again. He met them variously. His emerging aspects became personas, and eventually, he named them, as well as he could identify them. There was Gorge, and Grunt, and Howl, and another, quiet one that lurked on the fringes, waiting.

> [...] Howl handled the rest. He began to suspect Howl had been obscurely responsible for delivering them all to [the torturer] in the first place. Finally, he'd come to a place where he could be punished enough. Never give aversion therapy to a masochist. The results are unpredictable.

-- Mirror Dance by Lois McMaster Bujold


There's also Allen Carr's books about treating addiction, and they don't use negative reinforcement, at least the ones I've read

Rather it helps you learn to recognize the fallacies behind the addictive cravings themselves, and to thus resolve the core of why you turn to that in the first place

Still have to make the decision to recall those in the moment, but when you do you do neutralize the cravings

His first book was Easy Way to Stop Smoking

For digital addiction there's Smart Phone, Dumb Phone

For internet porn there's easypeasymethod.org (based on EasyWay to Stop Smoking)


I know two people that quit with that book, both more than 20 years ago. One restarted few years ago, the other one never smoked again.


I put wads of toenail clippings like ))))) in my Lisp code.

Didn't work; still at it, 25 years and counting.


I'll admit that I went quite far in your comment history to figure out if maybe those 5 closing parentheses were matching some long-lost post of yours, and as a Lisp addict you couldn't resist the temptation.

Alas, I am disappointed to inform you that your comment history will no longer compile :(

:)


I genuinely hope you find a way to quit. you made me do an audible gag sound.


> toenail clippings like ))))) in my Lisp code

I smell a custom font opportunity.


Yeah, counting parens! Dohohoho!


Go Parinfer, never look back!


As someone who has smelled burning hair, it at least sounds plausible. On the other hand, cigarette smoke already doesn't smell good.


people who smoke on the daily have already tuned out cigarette smoke mentally, the burning hair however is rancid to anyone.


Definitely not always true. I smoke, I hate it, I've tried to quit several times. The smoke smell has never repulsed me but I find it to smell terrible. Many people I know who smoke are the same.

It's a constant reminder that you're killing yourself for miniscule amounts of Feel Good chemicals at a time.


I've always enjoyed the smell of tobacco smoke. It's nowhere near as astringent and repulsive as woodsmoke and good tobacco often has a nice nearly floral scent or a sweet smell. The taste and the tearing up my throat and making my breath bad and the expense are all things I can do without though.

Does anyone else get seasonal nicotine cravings? In the warmer months, I don't even think about smoking unless I drink, but in winter I often can't sleep for craving a cigarette, even when it's been literally years since the last one.


Definitely. I'm usually quite successful at quitting during the summer. Then the winter months come and for some reason the urges come back.


That is the lie you tell yourself. But smoking doesn't give you Feel Good chemicals. It temporarily resets the clock of slowly building Feel Bad chemicals back to zero or back to lower. Its basically the same as saying: releasing that string - that I wound around my big toe - every once in a while gives me Feel Good chemicals. You are just relieving stress that has been created by the tobacco.


This isn't true at all, though. Nicotine is strongly dopaminergic, it directly produces euphoria.

You can describe the trap which is addiction without saying things which are obviously not true. Or, to return your uncharitable rhetoric back upon you, lying.


Ah yes, I lied to myself. Thank you for fixing things for me.


Use nicotine pouches or vape, there is no reason to smoke and nicotine isn't carcinogenic


Thanks but I'm not really looking for advice. Where I live vape juice is exorbitantly priced. Plus there are other habitual issues with vaping, such as vaping indoors which overall increases my intake. Pouches aren't always a solution either and don't solve the "habitual" part of the habit, which is the hardest part to kick for me.


That's why the pouches are good. They reduce your craving, therefore making the act of smoking seem less necessary. Of course, the act itself is still appealing, but then you can work on reducing that habit independently and perhaps saving it for special occasions. I find cigars quite good for this. Too expensive and fancy to smoke every day but you can really treat yourself on your birthday or on holiday with something like a cigar.


Pay the higher cost for the vape or you pay with your life. If intake is increase because you will do it indoors it won't really matter, it isn't nearly as bad.


I'm aware, thanks.


Nicotine pouches are okay, I would advise against vape though. Vape is honestly more addictive than cigarettes and I find, in large volumes, the vapour still affects my lung function. Nicotine pouches or gum are the way to go to get the benefits with minimal side effects.


I had the same experience. I vaped way more than I smoke, and it really is the nicotine that affects me the worst in the mid term. Pouches are expensive here after the tax hike and they make me feel dizzy and the gum makes me sick. I also scarred from a patch (my fault, I was dumb and left it on over a transatlantic and it chemical burned me) and they don't always work for me for some reason. Though they're my go to for when I try to quit.

I think the habit of actually smoking is the hardest for me to kick. The small break is what keeps me going and clears my head, especially during work, and it's hard to replicate that.


vapes aren't as cool as smoked tobacco :)


Cigarette smoke is vile, but burned hair is another level.


To that I raise: crude oil

Unbelievable how its products separately don't smell nearly as bad.


I’ve never experienced crude oil firsthand, but I assume you are talking about “sour crude” which has a high sulfur content, including hydrogen sulfide, resembling rotten eggs or raw sewerage. So-called “sweet crude”, with a low sulfur content, has a less offensive smell, smelling more like the petroleum products derived from it.


> where you put a wad of hair in your cigarettes

Oh god I almost gagged just thinking about it. If negative reinforcement works, that'd do it haha


SNRIs like Wellbutrin do this. They make cigarettes taste gross.


It is hilarious that page shows how one replaces FB with HN... which is precisely what I did in 2019, and now I'm a total HN addict, spending more than a few minutes on it at least 5 times a day.


In case you don't already know - set noprocrast in your HN profile to limit the time you spend on this site.


in case you don't know this only has limited effect, cause you can open it again in a private browser. besides the search works with the procast setting, and we're not talking external constraints, people, us, me,... lack at this point internal mental defenses against the negative impact of social media.


See, this is the problem with all these mindfulness tools. I, the human, can simply defeat every challenge the computer attempts. And i require the ability to do so in case i have a need that's only satisfied by searching reddit for textbook recommendations while I'm in half price books, or a youtube video to fix my broken zipper pocket before i head to the gym soon. The fact that they time wasting sites are also the "goldmine of knowledge" sites make me include a back door in any time minder tool. A backdoor which is only used when needed... until it slowly becomes muscle memory and the tool is defeated by my capacity to learn to fuck myself over again and again.


Instead you ought to pay someone $15/hr to sit next to you. Anytime you're distracted by a website for more than five minutes, they punch you in the arm.

They also have to know they don't get paid if you manage to convince them to go away and leave you alone for a while.


Someone should to invent an AI powered one that is utterly unpredictable and installs in the boot sector. You're browsing Hacker News one day and suddenly your smoke alarms goes off. You do it the next day and your Echo device starts playing death metal at highest volume. You do it the next day and your car alarm goes off.


It unsettled me a lot about just how much work was put into making the JavaScript version of this work instead of a purely Python version, due to how OpenCV works. I wonder how universal the laggy OpenCV thing is, because my friend faced it too when working on an OpenCV application. Is it so unavoidable that the only option is to not use Python? I really hope that there is another way of going about this.

Anyways, I am very glad that you put in all that effort to make the JavaScript version work well. Working under limitations is sometimes cool. I remember having to figure out how PyTorch evaluated neural networks, and having to convert the PyTorch neural network into Java code that could evaluate the model without any external libraries (it was very inefficient) for a Java code competition. Although there may have been a better way, what I did was good enough.


Creating a faster python implementation can definitely be done. OpenCV is a thin wrapper over the C++ API so it's not due to some intrinsic python slowness. It is not easy to resolve though and I suspect the way python code is typically written lends itself to an accidentally blocking operation more often than JS code. It's hard to know without seeing the code.


author here, sorry you have to see my janky JavaScript solution XD but one good thing of going with Tauri is that developing the UI is pretty easy, since it's basically just some web pages, but with access to the system, through the JS <-> Rust communication.

also, rewriting neural network from PyTorch to Java sounds like a big task, I wonder if people are doing ML in Java


A few weeks ago, I tried to compile Clang to WebAssembly, but got several different errors, and tried fixing a lot of them, but some of them seemed kind of impossible to fix, so I thought I would try again at a later date. However it seems I will not need to try again. I feel angry that someone made a convenient solution before I did, but also happy, because this probably implies that they made a consistent process to compile Clang for WASM.


Hmm, I wonder why `-pattern_type glob` doesn't work on Windows. Perhaps it is something that could easily be programmed into the source code?


If I were yo guess, it might be using the GNU libc (or compatible) glob functionality under the hood.


I looked up what "the sentinel" was, and it turns out it was a game in 1986, that works on the BBC Micro and Commodore 64, and has 3D graphics! I didnt even know it was possible to do that on average computers in 1986!


There was no texture mapping, and the 'trick' that makes it work is that all you can do is rotate/pan in place. The only movement is instantaneous teleportation.


It's still an amazing achievement.

The world procedural generation from a seed alone is amazingly well implemented in an environment so constrained most programmers nowadays wouldn't even be able to do anything in.


Leaderboard had a polygonal golf course. The course was flat, but drawn in a 3d perspective with billboard trees.

Stunt car racer had a 3d course and vehicle physics.

Elite had 3d space flight.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0w1e_kzLDo


Oh c'mon we had a full flight simulator in 128x48 monochrome in 1979!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FS1_Flight_Simulator


True, but the CPU the C64 used (MOS 6502) was introduced in 1975. Also the flight simulator was wireframe while Sentinel was solid 3D.


Wireframe, not full screen polygon-fill like Sentinel.


The online SAT was much easier than the written version, because (1) You don't have to read big essays anymore in the reading part, and (2) both math sections have the Desmos graphing calculator, with absolutely no features taken out. Desmos is far more convenient to use than a TI-84 for many things, so it made all the problems, especially the hard ones, much easier.

Also, in my opinion, their Bluebook testing software is actually pretty good, especially compared to other digital testing software I had to use over the years, like ClearSight.


Of course, in the real world, people are more likely to use desmos than a TI-84; the test conditions matching reality is a good improvement.


I am so impressed that you were able to figure so many things out in the puzzle! I feel like I would never be able to do that, but I feel like all that is needed is a lot of patience, a lot of time, and a lot of deep thought.


Yes! OP is far more clever than me. I used to think I was a smart person but it takes regular reminders like that to assure me I'm average at best!


Perhaps someone should make a monthly HN magazine, with the top articles and a "Who's Hiring?" section.


I would subscribe to Byte, DDJ, Creative Computing, and Scientific American (pre-1990 to be generous, maybe pre-1970 if I'm not), if their equivalents existed today.


Someone did, but I think it didn't survive: https://archive.org/details/hackermonthly-issue1

Maybe because too many people are mostly interested in the comments?


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