What’s your most unnecessarily elaborate tech workaround?

Hello! I'm in the process of finally getting off dot social. The plan is for @JustinPot to be the home of my journalism and @jpot to be for more general posting, (with more of a local angle).

I'll be porting my followers here to the justinpot dot com account.
That account is basically my website, which is built on WordPress. It works well for publishing and replying but is basically useless for following others, so I'll be using the PDX account for following people and socializing.

Plex keeps getting worse but Jellyfin, the main open source alternative, has a few real downsides. I break things down for WIRED: https://www.wired.com/story/plex-keeps-getting-worse-is-jellyfin-a-decent-replacement/

Cursive isn’t faster, and a few other handwriting myths I debunked over at PopSci: https://www.popsci.com/diy/cursive-myths/

Recently I asked my readers about underappreciated productivity tools and I learned something: you are all extremely thoughtful. 

Instead of extolling the virtue of specific apps, the way I would, most talked about something more important: downtime. Scroll through the thread—and I recommend that you do—and it comes up multiple times. Rest, peace and quiet, adequate sleep, even going for a run were all held up as “productivity tools.” And you know what? That’s accurate. 

Research shows that taking breaks makes people more productive. Louise J. Goddard’s research review outlines numerous studies showing that taking intentional breaks means getting more done, not less. The reason: working constantly makes you stupid. “Cognitive performance severely declines without frequent breaks,” the paper states. “Nonstop work results in mental lethargy that damages the capacity of the brain to process information efficiently and focus.” 

This means, counterintuitively, that companies that encourage employees to take regular breaks see increased, not decreased, output from their employees. 

The research also shows that people who take breaks see increased well-being, which is science talk for “less miserable”. The productivity angle gets played up more, sure, but this is honestly the more important thing. It’s good not to be miserable! And breaks help with that. 

You are more than your job, after all. So take a break. Going for a walk in the middle of the workday is delightful. So is walking away from your work to watch the last 30 minutes of a World Cup game, or taking the time to enjoy a cup of coffee. It turns out these things can make you more productive, but they’re also part of what makes life worth living. 

My readers are right: rest is the most underappreciated productivity tool. But that’s not why you should take breaks. Take breaks because they’re great. Don’t live life to the fullest so you can get things done—get things done so you can live life to the fullest.

Three years ago I predicted that Google’s AI summaries would trigger a death spiral for the web in a piece for The Atlantic. This is back when the AI summary in search results were only showing up for some users. To me—a journalist who writes articles that depend on search traffic—there was an inevitable consequence of this feature: the websites I write for would see drastically reduced traffic. 

Some publications would die, which is already happening. Others would adjust tactics, pulling their articles from search results to avoid their content being scraped by Google. “In a world where Google Search is no longer a reliable source of traffic, expect more sites to put up paywalls,” I said. “Traditionally, sites with paywalls still show up in search results, because they specifically opted in to be there. Will they keep doing that if Google could take their work and feed it into the AI wood chipper?”

The answer, for at least some publishers, is no. Mark Stenberg, in a newsletter piece re-published on Adweek, reports that several publications—including USA Today—are considering de-listing their sites from Google entirely unless the search giant pays for access. 

“Google, unlike its hyperscaler peers or pure-play AI firms like OpenAI and Anthropic, has not struck any licensing deals with any publishers,” Stenberg writes. “As a result, USA Today Inc. is prepared to delist from Google in the next six to twelve months, according to [USA Today CEO Mike] Reed.” Cloudflare, a major content delivery service, is also considering blocking Google by default—publications would have to change a setting to allow indexing. 

Google changed the terms of publishing online. For decades Google indexed the web and, in return, gave publishers traffic. Now they’re just going to index the web and show users a summary of it, meaning only Google gets traffic (and ad revenue). Why should publishers take that deal? It makes sense that some are starting to decide (or at least threatening) not to. 

I don’t know what’s going to happen. But I was right three years ago, and I can confidently say whatever’s next isn’t going to be great for the open web.

Featured image source

I spent way too much time thinking about a video game from 1993 and now you have to read about it. Sorry. https://justinpot.com/zork-and-the-social-impact-of-design-choices/

Both Bluesky/ATProto and Mastodon/Fediverse posts show up on my posts, alongside traditional WP comments, and I can reply to them all in one place. Feels like the future, somehow. https://justinpot.com/15363-2/

What’s an under-appreciated productivity tool? Non-AI answers only.

Multi-tasking isn’t real, and other productivity myths I wrote about for PopSci: https://www.popsci.com/diy/productivity-myths-open-offices-brainstorming/

Return to Zork is a 1993 a point-and-click sequel to the text-based Zork games, notable for being one of the first video games to feature live-action (adjacent) performances by Hollywood (adjacent) actors. It was a blockbuster of sorts when it launched, but it’s relatively obscure today.

It’s also…not very good. At all. 

Like a lot of failed art, the specific ways in which it’s not good are fascinating. The problems point to potential improvements, which in turn make me think about how design choices directly influence the way people engage with art and, in the world of software, interact with systems. 

In a weird way, I think this obscure point-and-click adventure game taught me why humanity isn’t necessarily doomed. Let me explain. 

Return To Zork is a series of puzzles that are, in theory, solved by observation, experimentation, and reading a lot of files in the mayor’s office. From playing as a child, I mostly remember my siblings and I clicking everything until something happened. 

The game infamously begins with a sequence that, done incorrectly, silently makes it impossible to win later on. You’re standing at a mountain pass when a vulture flies overhead and lands on a nearby sign. Below the sign is a plant. It’s one of the few interactive objects here, so naturally you want to try to pick it up. Do that, though, and the vulture will attack you (try three times and it will kill you). There’s also a rock nearby, though, which you can pick up. Holding the rock and clicking on the vulture brings up the option to “throw rock at vulture”, which scares the vulture away. You’re now free to pick up the bonding plant.

Logical enough. But here’s where the game gets cruel: pulling up the bonding plant kills it, which makes the game unwinnable. The game doesn’t tell you this, though, and you won’t figure it out until halfway through the game, at which point you will need to start over (if you’re still interested in completing the story, at least). 

So what are you supposed to do? You can dig up the bonding plant using the knife in your inventory—do that and it won’t die. That’s assuming you, first, noticed you started the game with a knife in your inventory; second, imagined a knife is a good tool for digging up plants; third, assumed that there’s a meaningful difference between pulling up and digging up a plant; and, fourth, that you even realized the plant being dead or alive had any kind of consequence in the first place. 

It’s a lot of logical jumps to make. Most players don’t make them. That, in turn, makes the game feel unfair, which changes the play style. 

The goal for the designer, I imagine, is for the player to be immersed in the world and narrative—to interact with the story. Hostile design like the plant puzzle makes this impossible. The player stops thinking about the story, focusing instead on brute forcing their way through the arbitrary puzzle designs. 

I’m writing this during a period of underemployment. I’ve seen it coming for a while—a lot of what I write depends on search engines for traffic, and AI summaries at the top of search results means fewer people are clicking those links. The result: I have fewer paid gigs right now. A user interface change means I can’t write the kind of articles I could before (at least, not if I want an audience, let alone a paycheck). 

I’m in a Slack chatroom full of other technology service journalists. Lately the conversation is dominated by news of layoffs and requests for help finding a role, an apocalypse entirely created by Google’s product choices. The sense of mourning is palpable. 

Three years ago I wrote for The Atlantic about how Google’s AI plans essentially strip mine the web, removing the economic incentive for publications to post things online. Not to brag, but I called it—I, and people like me, are completely screwed. I feel very smart. 

There’s going to be far fewer articles published on the web that aim to help the reader solve specific problems. That, in turn, could mean AI bots—Google’s included—have fewer helpful articles to summarize. I’m confident that in thirty years, people will talk about this as a problem that was predictable. If you’re reading this then, well, know that it was predicted.

Return to Zork, thirty years ago, was released to mixed reviews. In 1993 Charles Ardai, writing for Computer Gaming World, praised the visual effects and the inclusion of actual actors, but criticized the puzzle design. He also found the conversations frustratingly limited. 

“Much of the time, one can click all one wants and still never get a character to say anything substantially different,” he wrote. “In the process of learning this, however, one ends up sitting through every conversation four or five times.” 

Interacting with people is something extremely hard to get right in video games, even today. Modern games typically use what’s called a conversation tree, where the player is presented with two or three responses to a character’s statement. The player picks one, hears the reply, and is sometimes given some sort of quest. 

Return To Zork pre-dates this modern convention—there are no conversation trees. The player, instead, navigates conversation the same way they interact with objects—by navigating visual menus. The player can “show” any inventory item, place on the map, or photo taken with the in-game camera to any character they meet by clicking around. This is, arguably, a deeper form of interaction than the modern conversation tree—you can almost approach it like a human conversation. Unfortunately, most characters have nothing to say about most things, even when they logically should. Yet there is vital information buried in this conversation system. 

Return to Zork‘s design incentivizes players to play a certain way—to methodically click every item in their inventory in combination with every item they come across, and to ask every character about every single item possible, and seeing which few trigger a useful response. 

Other systems, outside video games, also shape the way we interact with the world. If you’re talking with someone on the phone, they can’t read your facial expressions, so all the emotion you convey has to come across in your voice. If you’re texting someone it’s even harder to convey tone, which is part of why people use emoji—it fills in part of that gap. 

Use a tool long enough and navigating these rules become natural. This generally happens without you even noticing because humans are adaptable. We navigate new communication technologies the way we do riding a bike—practicing until they become second nature.

But just because we’re not consciously paying attention to the rules of a communication system doesn’t mean they’re not impacting us. Scroll through social media and it doesn’t take long to realize that certain ways of understanding the world come across more naturally than others. That’s not natural, or inevitable—it’s the result of the way these systems are designed. 

A Return to Zork player approaches conversations with in-game characters in a particular way, clicking every item in the inventory to try to get a response. That is the result of design choices. The shape of our conversations online are influenced almost as directly. These systems don’t reward things like nuance, connection, or understanding. The commercial internet is designed to capture as much attention as possible, meaning only voices who attract attention—postive or negative—are rewarded. 

Looking back at Return to Zork now—with three decades of game design history in our toolkit—it’s easy to imagine a better version of the game. The conversation system, for example, could punish people for spamming questions—characters could become uncooperative if you keep asking about the same thing, for example, which would make the conversations feel more lifelike. It would also reward the player for connecting concepts. Solutions to puzzles could be a bit more based on logic, and less on trial and error. And, most importantly, it shouldn’t be possible to break the game without the player knowing that happened. 

These solutions may seem obvious to contemporary gamers, mostly because we have the benefit of thirty years of improvements. This is how culture works: we learn from our mistakes and change the way we make things. The idea of people smoking inside a bar or restaurant is, in 2026, disgusting to most people. We now understand more about what second-hand smoke does to the body, a lesson that in turn resulted in social change. 

We’re in a similar period of realizations when it comes to the commercial social web. I feel like most people know the internet status quo is not healthy, for them or for society. And I have no doubt that, in 2056, dopamine-driven social networks will be viewed with the same level of derision that smoking is now.

Is that too big a takeaway from a game as silly as Return to Zork? Yes. But you just read 1500 words about the social impact of design choices and I haven’t made a single reference to the “want some rye” meme until now, so I think I’m okay with it. Thanks for taking the time to read all that—I’m looking forward to continuing the conversation.

Really dumb that Canada's game is on the Fourth of July and the US game is today, Canada Day.

Added the round of 32 games to my #worldcup TV schedule tool. Every game is available with an antenna in the USA; very different situation in Canada. Check it out: https://justinpot.com/worldcup/

It’s possible to use AI without becoming an idiot but you’ve got to be intentional about it. https://justinpot.com/how-to-use-ai-without-stagnating/

Canada's first ever World Cup win was a 6-0 game where we had over 30 shots. Apparently the trick was to pretend it's hockey.

I just found out @buttondown has an inbox, and that I've not been responding to messages there. Not sure if something changed? Emails used to get to my inbox. My apologies if you're emailed me and I didn't write back.

saw the CEO of my former employer talking about his council of AI advisors on LinkedIn and am sincerely wondering if I should reply with links to mental health resources

Wondering if your files are safe in the cloud? I tried to explain all the jargon and make it easy to understand what to look for. Read it now at PCMag: https://www.pcmag.com/explainers/is-your-cloud-storage-actually-secure-heres-what-most-companies-dont-explain

Stop merging later than you have to! My latest for PopSci:

https://www.popsci.com/technology/driving-myths/

Reddit, the company, really wants me to install its app. When I try to browse the site on my phone I get a pop-up telling me to “Get the app to keep using Reddit”.

Reddit has its reasons for this. It wants to gather more data about me, for one thing. It wants to stop me from blocking ads. I want to not let Reddit do those things, though, so I’m not going to install the app. 

As I’ve joked, I’ve been trying to quit reading Reddit anyway. But I couldn’t help but wonder: is there a workaround? And there is, sort of: you can use the old version of Reddit, which you can access by adding old. to the beginning of any Reddit URL. You won’t see the pop-up—but editing URLs is an annoying thing to do on a phone. Also, the old Reddit is too small to really read on my tiny phone screen. So I needed another solution. 

It turns out that Sink It, which I wrote about for WIRED a couple years ago, solves these issues. This free browser extension works in Safari on iPhone and Firefox on Android (the mobile version of Chrome doesn’t support browser extensions). As of this writing, the extension does not solve the mobile pop-up directly, but it does support re-directing Reddit to the old version of the site. You’ll have to make this change in the settings. There are also options in SinkIt that make the old version of Reddit easier to read on a phone.

I tested this and can confirm it works. Every site I open loads in the old version of Reddit, adjusted to work well on mobile. Even better: no amount of browsing will cause the “Get the app to keep using Reddit” pop-up to show up. 

As I said: I’m kind of enjoying Reddit being broken on my phone, so I’m going to uninstall this. But if you want to scroll Reddit, and don’t want to install the app, this method works.