3 Years

| smoking |

I have this old iPhone XR that I turn on every once in while to check the stats on this app I used to use called “My Last Cigarette”. I turned the phone on today and realized that thanks to leap year, it’s technically been 3 years as of yesterday, since I had my last cigarette. The app still exists but has been enshitified, so instead of installing it on my new phone, I keep this old version around.

I’ve restarted the clock on this app so many times that I can’t even count. I used to wake up some days determined to never smoke again, reset the timer on the app, stare at the dashboard imagining how good it would feel to look back on it 1,5,10 years from then and be proud of myself. Then a day, or sometimes a week, and once even 3 months would go by before I crumbled and gave into the addiction.

I never imagined I would break free. Then three years ago something clicked, and the app keeps ticking away, I hope forever.

3 Years 
32,000 + cigarettes not smoked 
$16,000 saved 

Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.

Check out some more stuff to read down below.

Most popular posts this month

Recent Favorite Blog Posts

This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.

Articles from blogs I follow around the net

Highlights from my conversation about agentic engineering on Lenny's Podcast

I was a guest on Lenny Rachitsky's podcast, in a new episode titled An AI state of the union: We've passed the inflection point, dark factories are coming, and automation timelines. It's available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Here …

via Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries April 2, 2026

Flood Fill vs the Magic Circle

Musings from Robin Sloan: Most olive oil production at medium-or-greater scale depends on machines of this kind [over-the-row olive harvester]; they trundle over trees planted in long rows, almost like continuous hedges, and collect the fruit with vibratin…

via Information Overload April 2, 2026

The Blandness of Systematic Rules vs. The Delight of Localized Sensitivity

Marcin Wichary brings attention to this lovely dialog in ClarisWorks from 1997: He quips: this breaks the rule of button copy being fully comprehensible without having to read the surrounding strings first, perhaps most well-known as the “avoid «click here»…

via Jim Nielsen’s Blog April 2, 2026

Generated by openring