I guess it's pretty much impossible to stop these companies from gathering data, there's too much money in it, it's too easy to implement, and there's no cohesive force to stop them. I'm wondering whether a crowdfunded effort to feed fake data into these systems would work so we overwhelm them and make their plans a bit more difficult.
If you look at these systems that same way some people look at casinos - places specifically designed to take your money - you realize there isn't a way to change them nor improve your overall experience with them. You just don't go inside. I'm kinda hoping that it becomes the trend in the next few decades to completely abandon these algorithm-driven data-hoarding attention-stealing apps. I've been calling it "digital hygiene", personally.
I used to be highly addicted to scrolling. Tiktok, reddit, instagram, everything. It nearly cost me my relationship and I swore it off ever since. I’ve been offline those apps for a few months now, and have never felt better. Cant believe what i was allowing to happen to my attention!
Youtube: There are a few long-form creators I watch, maybe 4 hours a month of content. Besides that, viewing history is off, no apps, browser extensions block mostly everything (comments, suggestions, etc.)
Instagram: I have a 15 minute daily timer, because I sometimes post, and I sometimes receive DMs.
Reddit: Fully blocked, I think I ublocked everything.
Tiktok: I won't even download it ever again. It has an algorithm like no other for sucking me in. Dangerously addictive.
Facebook? Deleted it completely around 2013, so no idea what's going on there.
IMHO, the account is esp. useful for one thing:
selecting explicitly which channels you want to block - if you do this over some time, then you see that YouTube content is by far not unlimited, acutally rather limited if you select only really interesting things for you :-))
How's the dating scene where you are? Whatever bubble I'm in, in the US, while I could not be on Instagram, that would be making things harder on myself.
I totally get this sentiment and I think it applies equally to the actual dating apps, these apps are all garbage fires that you don't really want in your life, but they do have utility if you want to date.
So an idea I've been thinking about lately, is that evolution didn't produce humans that were wired to date forever. These app publishers undoubtedly would prefer that you keep using their apps until you die, so they're happy to see you also keep dating until you die. But that shouldn't really be how things go and it's not how most of us are wired. Most humans throughout history went through a brief courtship period and then they settled down with someone, even if that person wasn't perfect.
The app has utility in that courtship period, but the activity itself is meant to be temporary, possibly even brief, and ultimately give way to something else. The app publisher has an incentive to make you forget that.
I’m curious what you mean by this. Most of the guys I know treat their Instagram accounts like their LinkedIn accounts: It has enough information and occasional updates with major life changes, but they don’t actively engage with it all the time. Just let it exist and respond to any messages if they come in. Would that work, or are you saying the dating scene in your area requires some type of active constant engagement with Instagram?
Some level of engagement with it, anyway. Only having one post from 7 years isn't going to do you want favors, but I'm not saying you need to be on it 97 hours a day either. But the younger crowd seems to favor that app as a first level of contact, and you can escalate (as welcome) from there.
If you steadfastly refuse to have one, it seems like it'd be the same as trying with job seeking without a LinkedIn. Which you can do, but it seems like making things harder than they need to be when things are already difficult.
Instagram is a tool to help women manage their fan club of orbiters and get validation from them on demand (which is what makes so addictive for women). It might look like "hey there's all these hot women here if i hang out here i will get dates with them" but that's the mirage.
Hmm in our community it's also a way to connect when you meet someone at parties, that doesn't expose too many details like your real name or phone number.
Its the endless shortform videos. The brain was not meant to switch contexts every 20 seconds for 3 hours straight. I replaced most of my screens with e ink, and only allow myself to scroll through text based sites and rss feeds
On my desk I have 2 monitors, one normal 24" and one dasung paperlike. If I need to watch a video or do work that needs high refresh, I just switch to the other monitor. One side benefit of this is you can't use your computers in the dark anymore, you have to turn on the lights like you're reading a book. This does wonders for your eyes.
The e ink screen I use the most is a boox 10.3 tablet. It does have internet and can run android apps. So I can read rss feeds, hacker news, manga, ect. I don't do any "serious" work on it and don't sign in with my main google/apple accounts.
The build quality for the price is superb, and its the first eink device I've had that feels premium like an ipad. Its also super thin and the battery lasts me ~2 months on a charge.
As far as fun text based websites, you're already on the best one :) But I also have a million RSS feeds that I read to get the news.
Not who you asked, but personally I'm using an Onyx Boox Palma, which is a phone-sized Android device with an e-ink screen. I have Readwise's Reader on it, which doubles as "read later" and RSS feed reader, and works offline. Pretty happy with the workflow overall - I use it extensively when travelling and having time to waste (e.g. waiting at an airport or while on the plane/train).
Note about Onyx, they're kind of violating GPL by refusing to publish source code. Also, their Android devices are a bit special and you have to jump through a couple of small hoops at set up to be able to use Google Play (nothing special or complicated).
Why were you scrolling, what were you scrolling for? Were you trying to fill some void? :D
I do scroll on Instagram, but it was mainly to share some reels with my girlfriend, no other purpose. It was not addiction. I tend to forget to check hers (which she does not like so I try not to), and when I check hers, I look at some reels to send back, then I close the app.
I did scroll on Facebook when I started using it recently, and it might be leaning towards the addiction side, but I stopped myself from doing it because it is a waste of time and I realized everyone is arguing there, and their arguments are horrendous. I feel like were I to read it all day it would dumb me down.
But yeah, I think the best move is to not play at all. Use Facebook only when you absolutely must. Same with anything else. If you have Discord, you may use it for discussions, whether technical or not, but it can be just as addictive as the other website.
I'm also a recovering social media addict, it was a slow and painstaking transition but the benefits in terms of attention, concentration and attitude have been profound. The main metric for me was going from almost 5 hours a day of phone time 2-3 years ago, to about 1 hour today. Of course the socials still snuck in on other devices but that was the main thing which killed the poison at its root and then eventually all the offshoots withered.
The apps condition you to come back through a feedback loop. Once I broke the feedback loop enough times the whole idea of going into one of these apps or sites and watching my life disappear into it started to feel revolting, like I just knew it was going to make my day worse not better, then the hold was gone.
The next battle I see on my horizon is that I sometimes watch 20-30 minutes of YouTube subscriptions in the morning with my coffee. There's some good content, but sooner or later Google's going to try and kill my ad blocker and probably look for new ways to creep that time up into hours instead of minutes. I know it's coming and I'm ready to die on this hill rather than lose my morning. I will do absolutely anything to continue blocking ads, up to and including saying goodbye to YouTube, to Google, to a web browser, putting only TUI interfaces on my TV, anything.
My favorite small act of defiance this year was purchasing a $120 deluxe hardcover edition of the Lord of the Rings trilogy - that's a great work I enjoy enough that I'm happy to read it many times over the course of my life, it improves my attention span instead of worsening it, and it won't show me a single ad ever. So I figured in terms of recreation, it's one of the best investments I could make. Perhaps several of such omnibuses on a shelf next to a comfortable armchair is the best defense against Big Tech.
It seems an absurd amount of people misuse the term dopamine, I found this video https://youtu.be/x6_Ukic1tRM?t=1297 (in Polish, but there are subtitles and dubs). If you want to continue to spread "manipulative disinformation", by all means, some people have to be evil, but just be clear that it is pseudoscience up front.
Just like practicing "oral hygiene" doesn't mean treating your mouth like an enemy, nor does "dopamine hygiene" mean treating dopamine like an enemy.
It just means keeping track of the difference between empty dopamine, which rewards behaviors that don't benefit you, from dopamine which is working in its normal evolutionary context--to encourage behaviors that do, and being intentional about how often you engage in the former.
"Digital hygiene" sounds like the start of a mental framework with good intentions, and which might help somebody with their World of Warcraft problem. But that problem isn't really unique to digital things, they're just a commonly found example of it. If you have a habit of seeking out empty/fast dopamine loops, where the rewards come frequently and are otherwise useless except as a reason to continue the useless behavior, then you're likely to come off your World of Warcraft addiction and immediately find a (potentially non-digital) addiction to put in its place.
My point is that yes we need a new kind of hygiene to deal with modern kinds of manipulation, but no we shouldn't restrict its scope to computers. I watched the video, but it's pushing back against something altogether weirder than my point here. I don't see how this counts as "manipulative disinformation," or is in contradiction with established science about the function of dopamine.
it is possible through legislation. slap them with the fine equal to their two previous years ebita combined and all this stops within an hour. of course not like people that need to pass a legislation aren’t bought for a fraction of that.
these things are why frequent comments on HN that go “this company is not using our data for training, it is in ToS etc…” makes me literally LOL.
Please spend 5 seconds thinking about this. It isn't impossible, it isn't earnestly valuable now that gambling has taken ad fraud's throne (guess what the throne is for), and fake data doesn't work.
American legal system will curb stomp any tiny company on the other side of the world if they dare to draw an outline of Mickey Mouse, and you're saying that this same nation can't stop big abusive companies?
I didn't realize how big a loophole existed in the American legal system until this current president. It's basically entirely up to the president which federal laws get enforced, and against whom. Congress is entirely powerless, unless they can get 67 senators to convict during impeachment. It's the only lever they have.
Participating in the extraction economy is certainly a choice.
Young people complain about being worse off than their parents. Sure, the income gap has exploded, and there are many factors that are making things worse, but what exacerbates this is our complacency.
First, people are just more miserable in general because everyone on social media seems to be living the "Miata life", to quote "Workaholics".
Do you see any starter homes being built? I don't. All I see is starter mansions. Everyone thinks they are entitled to one at 26, while THEIR parents lived in a starter home until they could afford something bigger, at 45.
Secondly, and it's more to the point - spending money has never been easier. Want. Click. Get. Within hours. All this tech revenue is coming from somewhere.
What was the last time you audited your subscriptions? How much do you spend per year? If you watch two shows and a couple of movies on a streaming service, is it really worth the $240 per year? Do you listen to 12 books per year to justify the $180 Audible subscription just to break with the a la carte price? And so on. This stuff adds up. But, sure, it's CONVENIENT. These companies are counting on your laziness.
Become a responsible consumer, refuse to participate in being a product. Yes, I know, it takes effort and focus, but it's not like we do no have the power to walk away.
Big fan of devenv. I moved away from a Docker-based setup for local development at work to devenv. At least on macOS, the Docker setup was making my machine too hot, and the performance wasn't really the best. With devenv, the transition took a bit of work but the utility and performance is fantastic.
Is there an upper bound to the creation of wealth? Is it infinite? Are there any limits to its creation? Is there any inherent value to it without being able to "transfer"?
I find the belief that government is the only limit to wealth creation very intriguing. I also find it interesting that the talking points usually contrast "free markets", which I assume represents the best case, with just "government". Markets can be limited or impacted by forces outside of government (price fixing, monopolies, manipulation). Is there an equivalent best-case scenario for "governments" that we can use as a reference when discussing how they impact free markets?
I feel like AI is already changing how we work and live - I've been using it myself for a lot of my development work. Though, what I'm really concerned about is what happens when it gets smart enough to do pretty much everything better (or even close) than humans can. We're talking about a huge shift where first knowledge workers get automated, then physical work too. The thing is, our whole society is built around people working to earn money, so what happens when AI can do most jobs? It's not just about losing jobs - it's about how people will pay for basic stuff like food and housing, and what they'll do with their lives when work isn't really a thing anymore. Or do people feel like there will be jobs safe from AI? (hopefully also fulfilling)
Some folks say we could fix this with universal basic income, where everyone gets enough money to live on, but I'm not optimistic that it'll be an easy transition. Plus, there's this possibility that whoever controls these 'AGI' systems basically controls everything. We definitely need to figure this stuff out before it hits us, because once these changes start happening, they're probably going to happen really fast. It's kind of like we're building this awesome but potentially dangerous new technology without really thinking through how it's going to affect regular people's lives. I feel like we need a parachute before we attempt a skydive. Some people feel pretty safe about their jobs and think they can't be replaced. I don't think that will be the case. Even if AI doesn't take your job, you now have a lot more unemployed people competing for the same job that is safe from AI.
I spend quite a lot of time noodling on this. The thing that became really clear from this o3 announcement is that the "throw a lot of compute at it and it can do insane things" line of thinking continues to hold very true. If that is true, is the right thing to do productize it (use the compute more generally) or apply it (use the compute for very specific incredibly hard and ground breaking problems)? I don't know if any of this thinking is logical or not, but if it's a matter of where to apply the compute, I feel like I'd be more inclined to say: don't give me AI, instead use AI to very fundamentally shift things.
I get LLMs to make k8s manifests for me. It gets it wrong, sometimes hilariously so, but still saves me time. That's because the manifests are in yaml, a language. The leap between that and inventing Kubernetes is one I can't see yet.
From IT bubble it’s very easy to have impression that AI will replace most people. Most of people on my street do not work in IT. Teacher, nurse, hobby shop owner, construction workers, etc. Surely programming and other virtual work may become less paid job but it’s not end of the world.
Honestly with o3 levels of reasoning generating control software for robots on the fly, none of the above seem safe. For a decade or two at the most if that.
I am pretty sure we will have a deep cultural repulsion from it and people will pay serious money to have an AI free experience, If AI becomes actually useful there is alot of areas that we dont even know how to tackle like medicine and biology, I dont think anything would change otherwise, AI will take jobs but it will open alot more jobs at much higher abstraction, 50 years ago the idea that a software engineer would become a get rich quick job would have been insane imo
A possibility is a coalition: of people who refuse to use AI and who refuse to do business with those who use AI. If the coalition grows large enough, AI can be stopped by economic attrition.
AI could be different. At least, I'm willing to try to form a coalition.
Besides, AI researchers failed to make anything like a real Chatbot until recently, yet they've been trying since the Eliza days. I'm willing to put in at least as much effort as them.
Why do we think its Elon 'doing' this? Just curious, since it could just as well be that its the engineers and other leaders who could be the differentiator.
Because it's Elon who said "ok, build it." There's no one else except him with that power and/or the guts. Even landing a rocket the government had given up on, and no company was even trying until he did. People were calling the 'chopstick' landing system a dumb idea until today.
It's not like engineers don't come up with wild ideas all the time to their leadership, but is the leadership good enough to understand the good ideas from bad ones? Take the risk, spend billions to actually execute?
Elon has enough of a physics/engineering background to ask the right questions, understand the trades engineers put in front of him, and make the risk/reward calculation to make the right decisions the ends up winning.
To get what SpaceX has you need strong technical leadership all the way up the chain. Many companies don't. Their CEOs are experts in legal, PR, finance, etc... They make poor technical decisions.
I would agree with that if it weren't the case that the collection of engineers and other leaders working under Elon consistently outperform their competition in multiple domains.
I've started using worktrees recently and I have nothing but praise for it. It's especially useful to me because I work on multiple features and want to reduce friction from context switching. I basically have a structure like `/worktrees/<project>/<worktree>`. I use it alongside direnv and have my .envrc in the top-level project. That essentially allows me to set up project-specific environments for all of my worktrees. This works neatly with emacs projectile mode and lets me switch between different projects/features seamlessly. My head feels a lot lighter not having to worry about my git branch state, stashing changes, and all that jazz. I think it's a great tool to have in your repertoire and to use depending on your needs.
Now you can just create worktrees in the root of the git repo.
This has the advantage that the `~/git/<project>` directory is still understood as root of the git repo and the worktrees are never checked out inside the working tree directory.
The only problem I've ever had with work trees is my own lack of discipline; even with one directory per branch I seem to switch branches within each checkout without thinking and so make me life needlessly hard>:( Perhaps I should write a shell function to outright disallow switching branches...
I do that to but for the many stable branches of OpenStack/Ceph/etc that I’m working on at once (working on the distro/backporting side often back porting patches 3-8 releases). It’s great.
I recently started using Ledger this year, and I've been really impressed with its utility for me. I think, for my personal needs, https://pypi.org/project/ledger-autosync/ is a must-have. I don't want create my own transactions, and with the autosync extension, I can simply export my bank transactions as QFX files and then import them into my ledger file. In the past, I struggled to accurately track my spending, and typical banking apps were either slow or lacked good querying capabilities. Now, I can easily budget, track purchases, calculate my worth across multiple accounts, and more.
I guess similar results might be possible with other accounting tool but Ledger perfectly meets my requirements. Also, it integrates pretty well with Emacs and I get to check my reports from there.
It looks like ledger-autosync isn't very good at guessing what accounts to use. I wrote my own machine learning thing to do that. However my scripts are a hodgepodge with manual work required. I wonder if I could integrate the machine learning aspect into autosync...
Lmao I wrote my own csv translator using regex, because I thought this was a paid feature of stuff like Plaid only. You’re a lifesaver! How do you download your statements though? That’s still a small sticking point for me, and it sounds like you still need to individually go to each bank and pull each statement. Maybe I just have too many credit cards lol
I find it even more interesting that people are defending either corporation. Neither of them is our friend, and they do what happens to be profitable. The core problem here is that Apple has a significant market share in the US, and for one reason or another, they are inconveniencing a portion of non-iPhone users and/or causing an unnecessary divide. Does it have to be this way? I think the answer would depend on whether or not this form of incompatibility brings them any competitive advantage.
You can still choose automation. The easier route for me is to use wallabag to save the article. Then on my remarkable tablet I can grab a very readable document with https://github.com/koreader/koreader.
One other option is to use https://github.com/danburzo/percollate to convert a webpage to a nice document directly. I use both tools depending on my needs.
