Rambling on the subject of UI frustrations, and the modern age of customizable software.
You can just have a self authored browser extension. Once I realized this, it took ten minutes to follow a browser extension hello world tutorial, and five minutes to purge all youtube shorts straight to hell.
It turns out that this was actually the only thing I wanted to change about any websites I visited, all other changes I desired were of the shape “stop visiting this website” which is harder to fix with software.
Also, if anyone gets the brilliant idea to make relentless-creative-resourcefullness-bench after reading this post, message me. I will venmo you a dollar to not do that. Cobra paradox be damned.
That was the first thing I tried, but unfortunately extension hello world is a computer use task, not something amenable to text interfaces- lots of clicking through menus in both safari and xcode in exactly the blessed way.
Huh, sort of surprised at the xcode part. (I didn’t actually do the very first steps of my browser extension but it seemed to be mostly using Cursor like normal, and then clicking a couple buttons to import it into google chrome)
(this is maybe taking as axiom ‘learn to use Cursor, it’s part of being adult in 2026’)
Probably a safari vs chrome difference! (I’m curious- is your parenthetical actually cursor specific, or did you mean learn to use at least one of cursor / claude code / codex / etc )
It turns out that this was actually the only thing I wanted to change about any websites I visited, all other changes I desired were of the shape “stop visiting this website” which is harder to fix with software.
It should be possible to do that with a browser extension which substitutes pages from an unwanted site with a blank page or with a page with a “self-prohibition notice” or just redirects elsewhere (of course, nothing prevents a user from disabling the extension).
I may have a bit of a trapped prior that browser extensions written by other people are either malicious, or will auto-update to become malicious in the future.
quick note freedom isn’t a browser extension, it’s an app (which can still be malicious, but, literally their one job is make a VPN that prevents your computer from accessing the sites you don’t want from anywhere, and I think they have a reputation such that if it came out they were malicious malware it’d be a big deal for them)
Rambling on the subject of UI frustrations, and the modern age of customizable software.
You can just have a self authored browser extension. Once I realized this, it took ten minutes to follow a browser extension hello world tutorial, and five minutes to purge all youtube shorts straight to hell.
It turns out that this was actually the only thing I wanted to change about any websites I visited, all other changes I desired were of the shape “stop visiting this website” which is harder to fix with software.
Also, if anyone gets the brilliant idea to make relentless-creative-resourcefullness-bench after reading this post, message me. I will venmo you a dollar to not do that. Cobra paradox be damned.
Which tutorial did you use?
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/creating-a-safari-web-extension
In the current age I think “ask claude to make it for you” will basically works.
That was the first thing I tried, but unfortunately extension hello world is a computer use task, not something amenable to text interfaces- lots of clicking through menus in both safari and xcode in exactly the blessed way.
Huh, sort of surprised at the xcode part. (I didn’t actually do the very first steps of my browser extension but it seemed to be mostly using Cursor like normal, and then clicking a couple buttons to import it into google chrome)
(this is maybe taking as axiom ‘learn to use Cursor, it’s part of being adult in 2026’)
Probably a safari vs chrome difference! (I’m curious- is your parenthetical actually cursor specific, or did you mean learn to use at least one of cursor / claude code / codex / etc )
One of cursor/claude code/etc. (I’m not sure if Xcode counts as one of these by now and if that’s all you meant)
It should be possible to do that with a browser extension which substitutes pages from an unwanted site with a blank page or with a page with a “self-prohibition notice” or just redirects elsewhere (of course, nothing prevents a user from disabling the extension).
I think at that point you should just get https://freedom.to/, which is already pretty optimized.
I may have a bit of a trapped prior that browser extensions written by other people are either malicious, or will auto-update to become malicious in the future.
quick note freedom isn’t a browser extension, it’s an app (which can still be malicious, but, literally their one job is make a VPN that prevents your computer from accessing the sites you don’t want from anywhere, and I think they have a reputation such that if it came out they were malicious malware it’d be a big deal for them)