Chengfeng Mao

Karma: 24

Chengfeng Mao 19 Apr 2026 22:33 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: philip_b’s comment on: Chengfeng Mao’s Shortform
Remove anything I feel an unsatiated desire for and become agitated when I don’t have access to. No video games, TV, Netflix, social media. I turned my phone display to greyscale and turned off all those UI animation effects that make interactions feel sleek. I installed https://screenzen.co/ Screen time also works. I asked my partner to set passwords for them. On my laptop, I installed https://selfcontrolapp.com/ and set max block time to months https://gist.github.com/gschema/16bc1e77833dfe06e63b81256473fe72 Whenever I found myself developing any new addiction to a website, like novels on wikisource, I added them to the block list.
Finding a replacement could ease the withdrawal. Lesswrong is a perfect replacement for social media for me. The updates and feedback are much less frequent, and there is no endless scroll.
Perhaps finding a new superstimulus also helped. I got addicted to a mobile game a few weeks ago, and totally shifted my attention from social media to it. When I went cold turkey on all distracting apps, it felt easier because I had less attention on social media. Also, I haven’t developed much attachment to the game given the short time.

Chengfeng Mao 19 Apr 2026 19:41 UTC
16 points
0
on: Chengfeng Mao’s Shortform
I recently realized that self-improvement wouldn’t work without dopamine detoxing (at least for me). I’ve tried all sorts of ADHD medication and self-improvement techniques like journaling, GTD, 5 secs rule, mindfulness, counseling, etc., none of them stuck. I aim to be more self-disciplined by instilling them into my life, but they all require self-discipline to enforce. Especially if I’m surrounded by superstimuli like social media and meme videos, anything that requires attention away from them becomes extra annoying and painful.
When my brain is adapted to superstimuli, it also takes more willpower to shift my attention to something less stimulating or addictive. So I procrastinate more. I wait until the last moment when intense stress can override my craving for dopamine spikes. This also means I gradually lost my agency. I had to wait for external crises to push myself out of indulging in the superstimuli. But self-improvement and contributing to meaningful causes require serious thinking and work, beyond the bare minimum effort to avoid failing at whatever I’m doing. Only recently, after I went cold turkey on all the superstimuli, did I finally feel free again. Doing serious work is no longer that excruciating. I reclaimed mental space for more reflection. The flywheel of self-improvement finally starts spinning.

Chengfeng Mao 18 Apr 2026 20:09 UTC
3 points
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on: LLMs will soon disrupt algorithmic media feeds
I think a combination of stated preference parsed by LLM + recommender system trained on revealed preference will likely be a more balanced approach.
Telling the system my preferences probably works well in cases where I’m quite certain, like something I absolutely love or hate. But in a lot of cases, I’m uncertain or don’t even know what I want until I see something and show that through my revealed preference. That was the problem motivating research like this https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/k8SbrC8EMq2RpCmNg/post-mortem-ing-my-earliest-ml-research-paper-7-years-later The bias in revealed preference and stated preference is also a classical direction in the behavioral econ and psychology research: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=437620 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=992869
ML based recommender system seems to be capable of magically learn my preferences that I can’t describe, that’s why it is so addictive. But this could also be beneficial in cases where it can help us discover interests that even ourselves are unaware of.
I’m not that familiar with the latest research in recommender systems, but I’ve noticed a few work that have also been trying to mitigate the tension between addictive instant gratification vs long term well-being: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.10192 https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.01611 combining LLM into these systems is also very trending.

Chengfeng Mao 16 Apr 2026 22:25 UTC
4 points
1
on: Chengfeng Mao’s Shortform
I’m very susceptible to recommendation algorithms and have been fighting with binge watching videos or social media posts. I recently found that going cold-turkey is much easier than limited usage per day. When I have a quota to check these instant-gratification inducing apps, the temptation is always in the backdrop. Whatever I’m working on feels much more boring compared to checking those apps. Instead, strictly blocking these websites frees me from deciding when to use my quota, and eliminates the comparison. The work I need to do feels less boring. I went cold turkey by asking my friend to set the password of screen time on my phone, and installed self control on my laptop with prolonged intervals of 3 months.

Chengfeng Mao 16 Apr 2026 21:04 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Chengfeng Mao’s Shortform
that’s true. standing desk with a mini stepper may also help

Chengfeng Mao 15 Apr 2026 22:22 UTC
2 points
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on: Current AIs seem pretty misaligned to me
I had a similar experience using Claude with paper writing. You summarize my sporadic annoyance really well. A few more minor observations:
- It loves making up noun phrases like “prospective rules”, “compilation gaps”, etc. They read legit for someone new to a field, but look awkward and nonsensical to a domain expert.
- Such deep-rooted tendency or other preferences like the usage of em dashes are difficult to override with rules or memory files, especially when Claude focuses on other cognitive demanding tasks, or when it hasn’t recalled or applied the relevant rules within the past ~100K tokens.
- I mainly use Codex and Gemini to review my paper, as I find them more critical than Claude, especially on Claude’s own writing. Then I ask Claude to address their critique and iterate with this loop. However, this loop seems endless. The reviewers always find new issues in each round, but they never report everything they find. Also, as @lc mentioned, reporting non-issues is common, like over-generalizing beyond the scope I already defined and suggesting caveats at a paranoid level.

Chengfeng Mao 10 Apr 2026 3:41 UTC
4 points
0
on: Chengfeng Mao’s Shortform
My favorite thing to do when waiting for my AI coding assistant is to do burpee with push-up. Sitting for long hours is bad for health, and taking even a 5-minute break in between could yield some health benefits. Burpee is a great compound exercise to get the heart rate pumped in a few minutes. Squat is also nice. I also noticed more energy and mental clarity since I developed this habit.

Chengfeng Mao 5 Apr 2026 19:33 UTC
1 point
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on: 2026: The year of throwing my agency at my health (now with added cyborgism)
Thank you for sharing your experience! This also resonates really well with me. Executive function deficit is also a common symptom of ADHD, and I’ve gone through dozens of self-help books or techniques, like atomic habits, journaling, time blocks, pomodoro, hourly logging etc. None of them stick for more than 3 months, and none have substantially changed how I behave. I recently talked with Claude with this issue, and it points out that the habits I’ve been trying to build up require the exact executive function that I’m aiming to enhance, and this easily breaks when the excitement from novelty fades away. Then I started building a journaling app quite similar to what you describe, with some additional features like syncing with my Outlook calendar and helping me automatically block time and reschedule.
I haven’t started implementing the exo-brain part as you described. I’m quite curious how did you organize your daily logs into long term memory for the LLM so that they fit into the LLM’s context window? Do you follow any architecture from relevant research?