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better via worse (easy phone tweaks)

If you make your phone interface more annoying to navigate, you’ll use it less.

two iphone screenshots stuck together where you can see that a red and black texture phone background and red and black theming has made the interface near-unusable

The combination of this color theme and this photo background: profoundly unusable! I am not good at remembering what I am doing in the middle of completing routine steps, even when the steps in question are “navigate to your time-wasting app”, so introducing the extra friction of “open up the search and type in the name of the app” is enough to decrease how much I end up doing it¹.

I also replaced my normal browser button with a shortcut that opens the browser then opens my flashcard app on top of it, with the idea that it takes no time to do a couple flashcards before going off to noodle around on the internet. This one’s been slightly less successful since I started unconsciously navigating to the browser via the open apps. I’ll start trying to close the browser after use and we’ll see how that goes.

Did you know that ADHD runs in families? Haha no reason to bring that up, my debilitating personal incapacities are actually a sign of moral failure ↩

maya.land

15 Sep 2025 at 08:00

comment culture: it’s worse than that, even

16 years of commenting has made me zero friends. That scares me. All of that social activity with zero ROI. At first, I thought that I needed to change my commenting habits, and, you know, try to make connections. But the more I considered how to make friends in comment culture, the more I realized that it wasn’t just my own social ineptitude. Comment culture has a problem. Systemically, it produces an internet of strangers.

This is making a point about comment culture taking your social energy and throwing it into a black hole, with no value to turning strangers into weak ties, turning weak ties into strong ties, or maintaining strong tied. And that is all true!

I would submit that it’s worse than waste: commenting for an audience, you learn habits that are actively counterproductive in proper social interaction.

For instance: the value I’ve found in asking questions in average Internet comment sections is… little to none. People don’t tend to get what you’re getting at with questions, which makes sense, since you have nearly no shared context. Rather, it’s better to figure out what your clever little thing is you can toss in; if others “like” it, it’ll filter to the top, and if they don’t “like” it, it’ll filter to the bottom and not bother anyone.

However: this is a terrible set of instincts to develop if you actually want to have real conversations with people! Your clever little thing can’t be ranked down in a linear conversation, so you’re taking up airspace and making it about you and your thing – and with people worth talking to, we should all be asking way more questions! (I need to write up my notes on this book I read that argued that, because I think it’s been unfairly maligned)

maya.land

13 Sep 2025 at 08:00

mailchimp has secret rss

As an example, I recently wanted to subscribe to the RawTools newsletter. When I went to their newsletter subscription page, I noticed that their URL looked like this: https://rawtools.us11.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=00722345fc94fb4d4b323edc3&id=4ff553ba3e
If you can find a URL from a Mailchimp email campaign in a format like this, you can usually use it to get its respective RSS feed.
There are 3 pieces we need in order to find this list’s RSS feed, and all of them we can find in this URL:
us11 - This appears to be the Mailchimp server location associated with the mailing list’s account
u=00722345fc94fb4d4b323edc3 - I think this is a user identification code? Not sure. We need it, though! id=4ff553ba3e - Again, not 100% sure what this is; possibly a list id? We need it too, regardless ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Once we’ve got those pieces, we can use them to construct our RSS feed.
A Mailchimp list’s RSS feed looks like this:
https://[SERVER LOCATION CODE].campaign-archive.com/feed?u=["u" CODE]&id=["id" CODE]
The campaign-archive and /feed parts are the important parts that need to be switched out here.
So, we put all those pieces together, and end up with the following feed URL: https://us11.campaign-archive.com/feed?u=00722345fc94fb4d4b323edc3&id=4ff553ba3e
Then, adding that into an RSS reader app gives us the last few campaign emails that were sent out from that list, as well as allows us to be notified of future emails without it cluttering up our email inbox.

I thought I’d found one of these before but there are none currently sitting in my blogroll. Hope it’s useful to someone!

maya.land

11 Sep 2025 at 08:00