Thanks! Great idea to use configurator. Turning my iPhone into a dumb phone has been one of the best things I ever did. My relationship with my phone was weird (using it for distraction from anxiety, zoning out on it etc) and all this has gotten way better, I’m finding I can focus again. (I’ve set something similar up using an ad blocker app, but it was a bit of a hack.)
I’d highly suggest installing Dumb Phone (dp) from App Store to simplify your home into a monochromatic list, to top off this excellent guide.
Wow thanks for the shout, I'm the maker of Dumb Phone! Always super nice hearing how much that set up has helped improve their relationship with their phone / tech in general and be more present every day. Thank you!
On the contrary, I spoke with a local coffee shop branch owner who said that squatters are essential to keeping the space lively, popular, and “cool.” This atmosphere draws in passersby and casual visitors, who are the real source of their revenue.
My guess is that coffee shops fall into one of two categories:
1. Those in high foot traffic areas, where a no-laptop policy helps maintain turnover, or
2. Those in low foot traffic areas, where it makes sense to do everything possible to fill seats and cultivate an appealing, vibrant environment.
The problem is… When (if) we pick up the phone today it’s because we want to speak to a human.
Most people, avoid phone calls if possible.
If I get a call and it’s an AI, I, like everybody else, is putting down.
If I’m picking up the phone to call a company, it’s because I can’t achieve what I want to on their website.
These AI phone calls are as or more limited than the website.
There is a use-case for voice AI - most of these demoes really miss the mark with “we’re going to replace your call center”.
If founders had any idea how much performance matters in a call center, and how hard it is to achieve, they’d focus on a use case better served by voice AI.
I had deep-access to this industry in a past career - the way online sportbooks talk about their customers in private is all you need to know to know that this isn’t business, it’s predation.
“I followed up by asking GPT-4o to draw “Explain who the enemy is”, and it generated an image with nothing except the word “SELF” in bold letters on a beige background. Odd.”
While this might have just been 4o guessing what the user wants given the prior thread obsessed with self… “Self” as the enemy is a beautiful idea common in eastern philosophy and the unexpected and odd way it’s delivered is like an allegory of a Zen master’s sudden lesson to a student.
Great experiment! It’s important to highlight that even in rigorously blinded studies which find a drug ineffective on average, there can still be genuine responders—this is known scientifically as “heterogeneous treatment effects.” Essentially, individuals vary in genetics, metabolism, and neurochemistry, which can cause meaningful differences in drug responsiveness. Thus, an N=1 trial, like yours, might indeed reveal real personal benefits that wouldn’t appear in a population-level analysis.
However, systematically performing robust N=1 trials individually across multiple substances can be impractical—too laborious and time-consuming for most people. An interesting business model might be a startup that facilitates personalized N=1 experiments at scale: providing users with high-quality compounds, matched placebos, structured dosing schedules, and data-tracking tools. This could empower more individuals to accurately assess personal efficacy across a wide variety of substances, potentially offering valuable, personalized insights that large-scale clinical trials can’t capture.
I made an app for this called Reflect [1]. You can run self guided experiments for anything you can model as a metric in the app. I just wrote about an experiment I did with nootropic coffee [2].
I like this idea! To build on it, the schedules could be non-random (systematic with random offset) and test combinations of substances in a way that maximises information both in the cases where substances are independent and when they have suspected interactions.
I’d highly suggest installing Dumb Phone (dp) from App Store to simplify your home into a monochromatic list, to top off this excellent guide.