A desktop app that helps you stay focused on your most important tasks every day.
It appears on top of all your other applications to capture and channel your attention into the things you actually care about, before you get distracted.
In the morning, it helps you effectively plan your most important tasks and throughout the day it pulls your focus back to those tasks.
The very first online game I ever played was an amazing multiplayer space shooter called Silent Death Online on AOL Games. It was incredible and I blew through over $100 a month paying $1.99 hour to rank up my character, upgrade my ship, communicate with and eventually lead my clan.
With 56k modems, it took so long for the "shoot weapon" request to make it to the server that if you wanted to kill someone, you had to shoot well ahead of their actual ship. If you wanted to get good, you had to open up the debug console and use your ping to determine how far ahead to "lag shoot".
Suddenly, certain players began becoming well known for stacking up hundreds of kills in a game and ranking all the way up to Commander (max rank) within a few days. Over time, people began learning the secret: those were the first players to get ISDN and DSL and with their super-fast internet connections, it was like shooting fish in a barrel.
Those players were my introduction to the world outside of the AOL internet and I became eager to join it.
Around that same time, EA bought Silent Death Online and folded it into their online gaming services. That brought a new era for SDO which came to an end probably not much more than a year or two later when EA for some reason shut it all down (if I recall correctly, people started running credit card scams through the game).
What a time to be on the internet. I am still longing for someone to buy the rights to SDO and relaunch it.
The other thing we find with our 3 year old is that he can have his tablet and watch movies or shows on Netflix/VLC, etc. and it's pretty much all positive.
But he always prefers YouTube and when he's using YouTube, he mostly watches 3-5 minutes of something before getting enticed by another thumbnail.
At times when he's had free reign to YT, it really seems to drastically affect his general attention, patience, temperament and even ability to sleep (he wakes up super early asking for his tablet).
Once we cut it off hard, he goes back to normal.
We don't really believe in complete abstinence of those sorts of things (I think it will just make him even more sensitive to those algorithms in the future) but being aware of the effect, reducing YT and prioritizing actual movies/series has made a noticeable difference.
As they get older, you’ll also find YouTube Kids serves as the primary gateway for consumerism / corporations to begin influencing your child. Between Netflix / Disney+, the traditional 30s television commercial has effectively disappeared for kids. Corporations have pivoted to sponsored content on YouTube kids.
YT Kids most popular channels are streamed play sessions and toy reviews with superhuman production values and unrealistic depictions of what the toys can do. Once a child has watched an episode of LOL doll play along (for example), YouTube algorithm will recommend LOL doll collection videos, which associate completist collecting with peer group social acceptance. Free to play video game spots were even worse, directly focusing on alluring introduction of the game’s addiction economy.
I gave my children access to YouTube kids for some of the excellent educational content reasoning that it would be a relatively safe experience. Within a month their homepage and all recommendations (and I do mean 100%) were sponsored 5-15 minute long toy commercials. Their interest in animals, nature, science, and dinosaur programming remained strong but disappeared entirely from view outside of keyword search.
All YT and Google apps are now removed from the devices they use. I allow unsupervised use of PBS Kids, PBS in general, Nat Geo, Disney Plus and Netflix Kids (with time limits) but YouTube is filtered from my kids devices at the router. They are not allowed Google accounts; all YouTube content access is done via keyword search with a parent selecting the material and remaining in the room during viewing.
There are programs on YouTube that can’t be replicated anywhere else. But the recommendation engine is distilled corruption and dismay.
I think most blogging drifted towards affiliate marketing and as a result, Google drastically devalued that content (for that and other reasons).
As a result, I find it so hard to find genuine experiences through web search now. It's all just USAToday, CNN, NYTimes, Webmd, etc. media sites (which are themselves mostly just affiliate marketing/advertising plays, so maybe that wasn't Google's motivation).
I miss the days of searching the web and finding content written by real humans.
The only search I find that satisfies this consistently is Reddit (especially searching google with site:reddit.com)
I use Svelte full-time and absolutely love it, but I do have to admit I sometimes wonder what lead to the decision of {#if}{:else}{/if}, {#each}{/each}, etc syntax. Seems like there had to be less verbose, more consistent approach... But, I'm probably not fully-aware of the constraints and missing something.
I sometimes miss the brevity of the React way (which can also be good and bad) for handling conditional code-blocks {visible && <Component>} or {visible ? <Component1 /> : <Component2 />}
I loved that branding for them.