I just remembered about the `noprocrast` setting in this site[^1]. It's cool because it's like the server-side version of doing the 127.0.0.1 <domain_you_want_to_block> trick on your /etc/hosts file. The problem with that approach is obvious in the hands of any decent hacker: if you have physical access to it, the machine is not (should not be?) safe from you.<p>Server-side auto-blocking is cool because is like locking yourself somewhere and then throwing the key as a way to avoid temptation and I just realized I had been taking that for granted.<p>I know you can create / use another proxy-like service to do something like this, but it's quite cool that the site has the feature (a) natively integrated and (b) configurable to the likes of the user. That's what I call user-friendly UX.<p>Anyways, I only wanted to say that. We live in a world surrounded by predatory software that wants to lock us in, hijack our attention, or take us hostage in one way or another which lead to movements like OSS, copyleft, or local-first/local-only software. Then I noticed that we hackers tend to be obsessed about control: <i>my</i> software, <i>my</i> data, <i>my</i> compute running on <i>my</i> machine. But, it was pleasantly surprising to realize that, in the case of a site where one may become addicted to, it would be nice for the site to add a "layer of indirection" as we would love to say over here, where we "implement the callback" as... yea, don't let me come near you for a while... and the site actually takes away control from you /after you asked it to!/.<p>Pretty silly, but it made my day for some reason.<p>---<p>[^1]: If you go to `https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=<your_id>`, you can set noprocrast, maxvisit, and minaway as a way to block the site. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=814695