[HN Gopher] Using Home Assistant, adguard home and an $8 smart o...
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Using Home Assistant, adguard home and an $8 smart outlet to avoid
brain rot
Author : remuskaos
Score : 46 points
Date : 2025-06-22 20:26 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.romanklasen.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.romanklasen.com)
| remuskaos wrote:
| Neil Chen just posted this genius idea to disable internet
| filters for social media addicts:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44346450
|
| I've used his idea and make a home assistant automation that
| temporarily disables adguard home to do the same thing.
| NWChen wrote:
| Amazing work & thanks for the shoutout Roman!
| FrankPetrilli wrote:
| Seeing this, I had the initial idea of using AdGuard logs to
| trigger a power-down of your device if you try and visit brainrot
| content. I think I like it that way more.
| stavros wrote:
| Why is this using a plug rather than a Zigbee button? I don't
| understand the plug bit.
| rcarmo wrote:
| The plug has a button, and thus sends out an event when it is
| manually turned on.
| stavros wrote:
| Yes, but so does a button, no?
| taude wrote:
| I think this button is powered by the outlet.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| Zigbee buttons can last for years on a single coin cell.
|
| I think the smart plug may add a layer of inconvenience,
| since you have to lean down to the outlet to press it.
| The inconvenience is a feature in this case, though.
| nomel wrote:
| It's literally a button, with some extra stuff attached to
| it. The only requirement for a button is that if it's
| accessible to the person trying to press it (no pictures
| posted of that, feel free to assume). But, there's
| intentional _inaccessibility_ built into this project, so
| that may be an intentional _goal_.
|
| Thats's the great part about home assistant
| though...anything that can change states, with
| intent/meaning, is waiting to be tied to an automation.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| Nice idea. But it needs to be harder for me to reverse. I think I
| would very quickly develop the reflex of disabling WiFi on my
| phone so it loads the site via mobile data.
| mingus88 wrote:
| Like any addiction, the addict needs to first _want_ to stop
| suprjami wrote:
| Glad to see GL-iNet get a mention.
|
| Their routers are OpenWrt compatible by design, the factory
| firmware is based on owrt or you can flash upstream for a "pure"
| image. I've used them for many years and they're great.
| p1necone wrote:
| I don't know if this'll help anyone else or if it's just specific
| to me but I'll throw it out there anyway.
|
| Drop the idea that short form content like youtube shorts or tik
| toks or whatever is somehow ignoble and worthy of scorn.
| Recognize it's just a fun way to kill some time.
|
| Internalized that? Cool.
|
| Now find a comfy place to sit or lie down and binge that shit.
| For hours. Do it for as long as it brings you joy. Had your fill?
| Cool.
|
| Keep doing this, whenever you've got some free time and there
| isn't something else you want to do more binge that short form
| "brainrot" content. Do not let the thought that you're somehow
| "wasting" your time enter your mind. You're having fun, and
| that's all that matters.
|
| If you're anything like me once you've internalized the idea that
| it's just dumb short videos for fun and you've watched hours of
| them, you'll just get bored of it. Maybe you'll spend 20 minutes
| scrolling occasionally but your brain aint gonna rot.
| OtomotO wrote:
| That's me circa 2010 when 9gag became really popular.
|
| I used to watch memes and images for hours upon end. Until at
| some point I just stopped and never did it again.
|
| Over the years people would send some links. I looked at the
| picture, maybe laughed, and closed the tab.
| markerz wrote:
| I kind of agree, but the cost is high for young people. I see
| similar problems between brain rot and junkie snack foods.
| Older people grew up without this instant gratification and
| arent used to it the same way young kids are. I grew up with
| snacks and crave them regularly, but all my older friends don't
| even think about snacks the same way I do. I think the
| addictive this fades with the development of your brain around
| 25 years old, as well as increased life experiences, but the
| addiction to short form entertainment is strong enough to
| prevent you from getting other forms of life experiences that
| would eventually make that content boring and feel
| unfulfilling.
|
| As an example, I used to watch a lot of dance videos. Recently
| I started taking dance classes and the videos just hit
| different now. The bar is so much higher for me to feel
| impressed because I'm digesting the content much more
| efficiently now and so much content is just repetition with
| slight variation.
| devttyeu wrote:
| There's a recent stat of shorts getting 200B views per day [1].
| Assuming 5s per view, and 80 year lifespan, you get 406
| lifetimes per day, 144 thousand lifetimes per year. That's
| genocide numbers and arguably, maybe just maybe, not ok given
| how shallow this content tends to be.
|
| [1] https://x.com/YouTubeInsider/status/1936193827213394133
| charcircuit wrote:
| Entertainment being "deep" doesn't make it any less of a
| "waste" of time.
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| Nit: Genocide isn't about numbers. And watching reels isn't
| dying, at least not in any other sense than an existential
| one.
| devttyeu wrote:
| Maybe that's about the wasted human potential that's
| depressing. Other than that, this analogy only makes sense
| when framed in terms of some philosophy - i.e. if you are
| "long-term utilitarian" I don't think it's correct to look
| at massive consumption of brainrot favorably, even though
| individual experiences are technically kinda pleasurable.
| stavros wrote:
| That's only the case if you think that humans have some
| higher purpose than distracting themselves, though, which may
| not be the case for everyone.
| Centigonal wrote:
| oh, I wish. I have spent multiple 16 hour days watching just
| minecraft youtube videos. I'm an adult with responsibilities
| and many sources of joy and fulfillment outside of youtube. My
| personal appetite for mindless internet content appears to be
| infinite.
| mavhc wrote:
| Spend time examining your own brain to find out why
| j_bum wrote:
| I think this is dangerous rhetoric.
|
| I'm glad that _you_ had an experience where you found the
| corner of your internet to be boring. I do not think this is
| the common experience.
|
| And simply because _you_ didn't feel impacted by it, does not
| mean that it's not bad. This is obviously hyperbolic, but your
| comment reads to me like someone saying, "I used narcotics all
| of the time when I was younger, and I'm fine now. So everybody
| chill out." That doesn't mean narcotics are ok.
|
| Social media _does_ change your brain. It doesn't take much to
| find research on this, but here's an example of a longitudinal
| study of US adolescents [0].
|
| This type of online content is a form of a non-pharmacological
| "drug", so to say, as it can dramatically impact reward system
| connectivity.
|
| [0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9857400/
| garrettjoecox wrote:
| Dopamine receptors fried. Maybe fine for you, but I wouldn't
| recommend it to anyone, kids especially
| loveiswork wrote:
| There are helpful nuggets of wisdom here. Also let's
| acknowledge some people are prone to watch hours of short form
| content a day, every day, at the expense of everything else in
| their lives, for a very long consecutive time (of course I know
| him -- he's me). They really are addicting!
| userbinator wrote:
| Distracting yourself from distractions by building an overly
| complex system to help you do that, and writing an article about
| it, is certainly a very HN-ish thing to do.
| polivier wrote:
| I love Home Assistant.
|
| Many years ago we gave our then-toddler an old digital camera to
| play with. Some time later, we looked at the pictures he took. We
| were horrified to find out that he took pictures of the outside
| of the house at night. As in, our toddler would unlock and open
| the front door, go outside (at night!), take pictures of the
| house, go back in, close and lock the door, and go back into his
| bed. I bought some wireless door sensors and created an
| automation where if the sensors are triggered between 10pm and
| 6am, the lights in our room would turn on to wake us up.
|
| I expanded this later and today we have sensors on all
| doors/windows that kids can use to leave the house (we have 4
| young kids). As it happens, these are the same doors/windows that
| burglars can use to enter the house, so this doubles as an alarm
| system (that we can activate when we leave the house and will
| notify us remotely if the sensors are triggered).
|
| The best part is that with Home Assistant you are not locked into
| an app/ecosystem. Our door/window sensors are of a different
| brand than our lightbulbs, and we control everything from a
| single app.
| awaymazdacx5 wrote:
| rasberry pi-5 for HDMI virtualization on a Wayland windows
| manager column should serve adguard assistance
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(page generated 2025-06-22 23:00 UTC)