I'm tired of convincingly presented falsehoods. I hate being on my phone. I also can't stop being on my phone.

It's hyperbole like this that breaks the illusion for the post. I'm not an editor, but if you're trying to make a valid point you need one man. Stinkeroo.

I think it is as easy as setting boundaries: practice meditation. Learn to enjoy sitting and doing nothing, both in the living room and sitting outside.

Then when the time is right, work hard for several hours to get important stuff done.

Food tastes best when we are very hungry, so we must go long periods of time doing mini-fasting a few times a day in order to enjoy food. Similarly, earning a living or experimenting with tech should be something that you sit down and do for a while, then do something else.

For the authors complaints about ads, I recommend paying for ad free versions of things you truly enjoy. Budgeting will mean you consume less and have fewer choices, but enjoy it more. And if something doesn't offer an ad free experience you can pay for, that's a great reason not to use it.

> I long for the days of driving through the night with AM radio, where at least the ads were interesting.

AM radio sucked.

Obviously, we shouldn't let this happen. Keep paper tickets, physical menus, cash, etc. These things are human, made by and for humans. They make sense across the intelligence spectrum as they connect to us in the physicality of the real (which everyone understands).

Of course, the individual doesn't get to decide if all his government and city services app-ify themselves. What to do in that case? I guess this guy's chosen the path of minimal leashing: wearing the digital yoke as little as possible. That's just harm minimization though.

Perhaps it'll help someone to say this: It is possible to live without a smartphone. I do it. There's times when you can't use a service. QR codes are meaningless. You might occasionally be bored. I've always found an alternative or workaround to these issues. Yes, that's inconvenient sometimes (usually not though, surprisingly), but is that worse than being a slave to glass slab?

But I'll post about it on the network

Also people need to hate ads more. A single unwarranted notification will get me to disable all notifications or uninstall your app. If you don't hate ads enough, you'll find yourself being shown ads.

But Ali Express is not one of those. It's very feasible to delete the app, or at least turn off the notifications. The quality of TV writing may have taken a nosedive but nobody is forcing you to watch TikTok Empire. If you long for the golden age of television, you can find disc versions of The Wire, Mad Men, The Sopranos etc. Often they're free to borrow at your local library. The App Store is indeed garbage, but I open it a handful of times per year and probably spend less than a minute to search for the app I want and install it.

The argument about losing control to devices would be much more effective if the examples weren't mainly cases where the user clearly has control.

It's ironic that we've come full circle here. This is generally what AI does - nothing that isn't prompted, and yet still part of the end and nothing like the beginning of the internet

I think my killer feature would be a phone that is only configurable at a laptop. You can install whatever you want, but it has to be at the laptop. Website allow lists on the laptop. You can uninstall and block things on the phone but you can’t reinstall or unblock them until you’re back at your computer.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46352747

Look, I understand the issues the author has with our current world, though I'd argue there are methods to avoid many of the things they mention (like ads). But it was hard to follow between the silly examples (Steam Deck games needs updates? And?) and the legit issues. Also I'm not sure what kind of rose-colored glasses they are wearing but I will never agree that the "ads were interesting" on AM or FM radio. Thankfully I was not subjected to radio, and the ads which I abhor, for long before I gained control over what I wanted to listen to and when. To pine for such times is anathema to me.

This is such an incredibly pessimistic look at our present. I'll be the first to tell you about what I see as wrong in our society and the author make a number of salient points, but we live in an age of wonder. Yes, there is bad, plenty of it, avoid it is hard but not impossible. Or maybe I'm just an earlier version of the author who still believes in a Star Trek future (TNG/Voy/DS9, not the crap they are putting now, though Lower Decks was a joy).

My phone is a freaking tricorder, I control robots in my house, I turn on/off the lights with my voice, and I can build new software by talking to my computer. I don't deny the bad, nay, evil in the world, but what a bleak outlook this author paints.

And yet I never had (oh well, I did register and post 1-2 posts N years ago) Twitter, Twitcher, Threads, MySpace, Instagram, TikTok, Red Book, Facebook, any other -book for that matter, no Youtube channel, and I very rarely watch it. I also never "get information" from these. I don't understand how people do it.

So every time I got a "rabbit hole itch", I went straight to Google, lost in some niche blogs or forums.

Nowadays, of course, the Internet is gone - you can't Google a non-LLM blog, or there are just no non-LLM blogs anymore? So I go straight to Deep Research. I don't enjoy it, but I would never think to find my information on Twitter or something. Sometimes I will read a book. There are niche books with info that LLMs do not have, or have but it's shallow.

Maybe all of this is just because I'm a loner without any friends. That's one possible reason.

I also don't have any streaming services. Everything you need can be... found elsewhere wink-wink, in good quality. We watch some older stuff, Breaking Bad, Person of Interest, some non-English stuff. Same with music. Let the dust settle and watch the good shows 2-3 years after. You also get the benefit of ignoring ones that get canceled (OA anyone).

YMMV I guess.