concentration

Notifications killed our concentration. Now they are kidnapping our mobiles

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For more than and a half, the applications of our mobiles They are perfect machines to suck time that hook us with techniques such as Scroll infinite. We have ended with A generation that lives decentralized Even when we do not receive relevant notifications of work, school, friends or family. And that is precisely one of the big problems we face today: an enormous amount of useless, irrelevant notifications and in many absurd cases that kidnap our mobile. What’s happening. It is increasingly common to receive unwanted notifications on our mobile. And the pity is that, in the face of email, there is no Spam filter. The problem is that there are applications of banks, neoboncos, transport, electronic commerce, food at home or second -hand sale, for putting examples, which do not stop riding advertising notifications without relation to the reason why they are installed. The problem. The engineer and hacker Jaime Gómez-Obregón told Recently the behavior of some of the most popular applications you had installed on your iPhone. Blablacar sent him promotions notifications, despite having deactivated trade communications. Without authorizing offers, they arrived from Cabify, Uber or N26. His followers told him that the same thing happens with Revolution, Wallapop and Banks Applications such as BBVA. A server can talk about your experience with OpenBank: receive more promotional notifications than bizums, payments or transfers, despite having requested that they do not send me more advertising to your customer service by phone. When deactivating notifications as a final measure is dangerous. We talk about kidnapping because, although both in iOS and Android we can deactivate the notifications of the applications we choose, the important thing is what we lose in doing so. If I am waiting for the Uber driver to arrive, I can’t deactivate his applications. If I am waiting for a possible Wallapop buyer to respond to which I am interested in selling something quickly, I cannot deactivate notifications. The same happens if I am waiting for the notification of my payroll or a transfer in the bank or the message of a Blablacar driver for a journey that I cannot do with any other means of transport, and that of not seeing it, I risk not being able to reach a destination. In the end, it is similar to deactivating notifications in a WhatsApp group where a lot about important things are discussed. With the difference of our contacts they know that they can talk to us in private to let us know that something relevant is cooked and we have not heard. In Wallapop you can individually deactivate promotional notices. Without losing user messages notifications. The solution we expect and does not arrive (with exceptions). The rain of promotional notifications is easily solved, if applications developers want. In the APP notification settings it can be offered separately stop receiving notifications of direct messages, a public mention, or advertising. The problem of many applications is that everything gets into a sack, and you cannot deactivate only advertising, or not in an obvious way (without having to send mails, make calls, etc. In this sense, my partner Javier Lacort complained on Twitter a long time ago Wallapop behavior. Without defining the type of promotional message he was learning, Javier learned thanks to The response of a follower That Wallapop is one of the companies that incur this good proposed practice: it lets you deactivate the promotions separately. The general reality? Insufferable. Google is clear that it is wrong. Apple not so much. On its documentation website on developers, Google makes clear “When not using a notification“The reality is that with their services they send similar messages. Apple prohibited notifications with ads until 2020. Changed the rulesand now Send notifications promoting savings in tickets to see ‘F1’ In the portfolio application. Even so, in the Standard 4.5.4 They modified continue to mention the following: Push notifications should not be used for promotional or direct marketing purposes, unless customers have explicitly accepted to receive them through a consent text shown in the user interface of your application. This is how Google explains to developers the bad practices on promotional notifications. And when requesting the notification permit, Wallapop, for example, does not inform in any way that it will later send promotional messages (although in your case we can deactivate them separately). When asking for notifications, applications do not report that they can contain promotional content, as Apple establishes in their terms. In full era of AI, both Google and Apple could implement filters to detect notifications not requested by the user and whose relevance is very questionable. They could also provide the system of functions to filter keywords or list of words allowed and prohibited according to each application. It is just what he does Bullkill Notification Manager on Androidand its users mention being Very happy Just to combat promotions. Android offers control of notifications by category, but, again, it is something that the developer has to activate so that the user can choose what type of messages he wants according to the app. Image | Generated with chatgpt and Jonas Leupe in Unspash In Xataka | I have been following the advice of those who point to the mobile and its notifications such as the tobacco of the 21st century

Four AI companies control how Half Mundo reasons. It is the greatest concentration of intellectual power in history

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While the public focus is concentrated in the possibility that the AI ​​will take our job ahead (Business Insider 21% of its template has just announced citing it as a cause, the CEO of Axios has published A text by the chungosAnthropic’s CEO has shouted “that comes the wolf” to justify that only they can save us), In the background something less visible is happening: We are giving our intellectual autonomy in favor of efficiency and comfort. It is not just that four companies –Openai, Google, Anthropic, Meta – are building the infrastructure with which millions of people resolve doubts and make decisions. They not only manage data: they also protect the way we link ideas. The Great Chinese of AI They are out of this equation for a simple reason: their still domestic approach without the international vocation of the Americans. Google (the search engine) was and is influential, but with it we have had to spin our own speech: Cotejar Fuentes, Weighing biases, assume contradictions. The generative AI instead serves a round response that It sounds coherent even when hallucin And that’s why he demands less surveillance. The result is that we are replacing the “internal process” with an external verdict covered with a technological aura that deter the replica. Whatever you say, Chatty. Delegate is too tempting. Save time and headaches. The problem is that we do not subcontract logistics, but criteria. We ask Chatgpt A professional strategy. TO Claude A curriculum. TO Gemini today’s interpretations. In doing so we accept without discussing the biases and empty of a trained model about texts that we will never see. It is an invisible assignment and, therefore, difficult to question. Never before so few hands had defined what questions can be asked and what answers sound reasonable. History has known infrastructure monopolies – electrity, internet, railways – but never one about reasoning patterns. Now another qualitatively appears: It operates on the symbolic plane, where narrative frames are defined through which we understand the world. Very subtle and very decisive. What previously implied a deliberation – read, contrast, imagine scenarios, weigh nuances – today becomes an instantaneous response, of definitive appearance. What to think about euthanasia? How to react to infidelity? What economic model is more fair? We no longer look for elements to think: we look for the correct answer The faster and more comfortable. And we accept as valid the one that sounds best, even if it ignores what does not fit in your narrative. Its effects will not be immediate, but predictable: a slow loss of variety in thought, of ideas out of the ordinary. Platforms have progressive consequences. Tiktok and Spotify, for example, They have made the songs last less and the chorus arrive before. What consequences will the LLMS within fifteen years? If we all consult models that converge towards average responses, intellectual eccentricity – culture rate for innovation – It will be increasingly weird. There is hardly a brake for AI, but perhaps at some point we have to decide how much reasoning we are willing to deliver before staying without it. Outstanding image | Xataka In Xataka | Deep Research is not just a new AI function. It is the beginning of the end of intellectual work as we know it

We have been trying to recover the concentration for years using white noise. These researchers believe that we are self -taught

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In 1984, the German director Philip Gröning He wrote to the prior of the Great Cartuja requesting permission to record a film about the isolated and lonely life of the Cartujos monks in the heart of the French Alps. That is, about the great silence. The monks told him they had to think about it and thought about it for 16 years. He left everything recorded in ‘Into the great silence‘And every time I cross the movie I think about the same thing: that this deep and dense silence is an endangered species. In the modern world We can only use noise cancellation And, if perhaps, put on white, pink or brown noise. Or we believed. But is it really for something? That is what Joel T. Nigg and his colleagues from Oregon Health & Science University have wondered. In A recent article They have systematized everything that is known so far and, although there is good news, their conclusions are a jug of cold water. To start because, although it is an issue that is spoken a lot, there is no quality research that is based. NIGG’s team He just found 13 Useful studies (with 335 participants in total). The sample was limited, but enough to explore how the different types of noise affect the attention and cognitive function in young children and adults. And what have they discovered? Indeed, as we thought“White and pink noise improve performance in tasks that require attention for those who have ADHD symptoms.” For going to the data, they found “a small but significant positive effect (improvement of between 8 % and 10 %) in the executive care” of these people. In addition, the results are surprisingly consistent. In fact, it seems, those who were not medicated, obtained better results. What is the problem, then? That the effect is reverse in the case of people who did not have ADHD. “In this case, white and pink noise negatively affected the performance in the task,” Emily Reynolds explained. A notice to navigators. Because on the one hand, it is a good sign that, often, the information we obtain online, from mouth and even the theoretically reliable sources. The evidence available in these fields is usually much more anecdotal than we would like to confess. However, we should not exaggerate the conclusions of this work. After all, as the authors themselves saidthe investigation is scarce and not as good as we would need. That allows us to draw some conclusions, discard some things; But do not unbrush all the pitch. So … we must stop putting white noise? At least we should rethink it if what we want is to concentrate. It can be used for other things and, who knows, there may be cases that are better than the alternative (listening to music, having the background TV …); But in general terms, it seems that it would be necessary to rethink it a bit. Image | ICONS8 TEAM In Xataka | Four experts explain what it really is like to have a good night: sleeping “of a pull” is a myth

My concentration ability takes a long time. Working in a laptop almost 15 years ago has saved me

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Our care economy is broken. Completely. We are continuously bombarded by stimuli that come by many ways and the consequence is clear: We distracted ourselves with the flight of a fly. It is curious how this is causing a change not only in us, that we look for methods not to distract us, but in elements such as an entertainment industry that has changed its way of capturing our attention. There are two very clear examples of this. Music is one more or less obvious, with increasingly short songs (just a couple of minutes) and, some, with the chorus as the beginning of the theme. In addition, these choruses are also short to fit in the 15 seconds that you can share in an Instagram story. Another example is that of films, with trailers of a couple of minutes that begin with a trailer trailer itself. Here are an example of ‘TOP GUN MAVERICK‘, whose trailer starts with a five -second teaser with images that we will see below: Many more films make this, being a marketing resource that begs us to Let’s pay attention For two minutes. They seem to beg a “Please, pay attention to me, cool things come”. Due to that constant information bombardment, We seek to be productive when we are hyperstimulated And we read books, we learn from successful people, we put into practice supposedly infallible methods, we download applications and, sometimes, we spend more time looking for how to be productive That, really, being. I have to say that I have found a secret to Improve my productivity: Working on a computer that prevents me from opening more than three tabs at the same time. And – at least to me – it works. A hardware barrier If you are reading this it is because you have looked for ways to be more productive and not distract you. I have done it and I have installed everything on my computer, I have configured Ways not to bother the phone And even issues that restrict apps during work hours, but the meat is weak and the finger always tends to go open Bluesky or worse Instagram and Tiktok. One day it occurred to me that, if the software did not limit me, perhaps the hardware would. I went to the closet and took out of the box (I am one of those who keep the boxes of what he buys) My university laptop: a 2011 MacBook Pro. 16 GB of RAM A double -core i5 at a few 2.4 GHz and 13 inches of screen. Years ago I replaced his hard drive with a SSD and I was surprised to light after so many years. What did not work was the charger (nothing that does not solve Amazon and some 20 euros), so I configured it and came across the first problem: I was very outdated. Not only could he not update to a new operating system, but browsers such as Edge, Chrome or your own Safari They were insuffically slow. Nor could I install some applications that I use on a day -to -day basis, such as Notion, because they require a more recent version of the system, so I did with a Firefox Legacy and configured it so that Notion Be the default opening page. You will be wondering why I tell you this, and there I go: when I changed this laptop for a more recent one in 2017, something was already slow and having more than 4-5 tabs in a browser was unfeasible. Despite the 16 GB of RAM, the processor could not with so much without making the fan a turbine, without heating the chassis and without making the system on pull. Precisely, the reason that forced me to make the leap to Infame Macbook Pro with butterfly keyboardIt is the one that made me come back because I wanted, precisely, that. I explain: when I work on a website like Xataka, I do it with a lot of open eyelashes to search for sources. I have Telegram installed, YouTube Music, an image editor and Many times I open, almost by inertia, some social network Or youtube if I don’t feel inspired. With issues such as news or reports, having that overestimulation does not bother me because I know it is something that will take me for a while and then I will happen to something else, but the thing changes when I have an analysis or an opinion article. Does the screen divided there? Neither joke For this type of texts, the concentration is key. You have to turn your thoughts and structure them in a certain way. You cannot afford to get distracted because you lose your thread, and those distractions do not exist with a laptop from almost 15 years ago. If I have more than three tabs open at the same time, the Mac goes to the idle, so I only have notion, Perplexity (precisely to look for something and have many options in a single tab instead of many sources in many tabs) and YouTube Music. Web Telegram It is not an option, for example, and as soon as I have four tabs, the processor is already asking for rest. That with four Firefox tabs That technological barrier, almost physicalnot only does it exist because of how the Mac would go if I open more eyelashes: the screen also plays a paper. 13 inches are not bad and many current laptops have that diagonal, but here the resolution is 1280 x 800 pixels. Translation: scarce, much, so much that putting a game is not an option. Not having a high resolution, putting a split screen is unfeasible, which forces me to have a single screen I am writing, preventing you from having an eye in my text and another in a YouTube video, for example. As I said, it works for me and it is something that I have incorporated into my work routine. … Read more

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