> every other modern app tries to claw your eyes out.
They do, and it's annoying that even apps for "real work" do the same thing by flashing notifications/tips in your face, advertising a new feature you don't want to use right now, or warning you that everything is about to break soon.
> The internet wasn’t always like that. Before recommendation algorithms where a thing, you had to decide what you would be doing on the computer.
> You didn’t really have one big app that you could open and order it to entertain you. Instead, you had a few dozen of bookmarks to websites, each with a specific idea in mind.
This overlooks how common custom homepages such as Lycos, Yahoo! and My MSN were and how the browsers pushed these as their default home pages.
While they are not as addictive as "the algorithm" of today, they were still packed with clickbait images/links to attract your attention and ads to drain your wallet.
I think this needs a strategic change. Unless you have a clear cut life objective and you are really into it, everything else you try to improve are at most tactical wins that will be lost to time. And those small wins actually make the end frustration worse because you thought you won strategically this time.
I’ll also going to declare that doom scrolling-ish working on non-impactful personal projects is as BAD as doom scrolling twitter.
Alternatively we can have a committee distribute attention over things that are useful to the economic units. Say, if someone next door is looking for an employee with exactly your expertise and experience and they are willing to pay for it the job offer is worthy of being at the top of your feed.
That the person might not like seeing the perfect offer is less important than filling the hole in the economy.
I agree that clear cut life objectives are important. This generates a competing interest which is the best way to defeat any addiction.
But working on non-impactful personal projects is also not as bad as doomscrolling twitter. Personal projects are a good way to build skill and grow your own confidence. Twitter doesn't build anything of significance.
On the social science side, The Ecology of Attention[1] talks about attention as an ecosystem and the final economic frontier for capitalism. It envisions a world where every moment of our attention is fought over by commercial entities, which feels pretty prescient at the moment.
> Instead of picking what we want to see we let other people decide what is supposed to be good for us.
100% agree, and this is exactly why I disable any sort of algorithmic recommendations on the platforms I’m active on. I do this either through the app itself or by using those platforms on the web and hiding distracting elements with an extension like uBlock or AdGuard.
My final feed consists only of channels/profiles I directly follow. Oh, and there’s also RSS…
I really recommend everyone do the same. It really clears your head.
There are a few particular problems with this. Let's go with the most extreme example I can think of.
You walk up to the interface of an infinite digital library. In this library there are an infinite amount of books that you'd like to read, or even contain anything coherent for you to read. The problem is there is also an infinite amount of books you don't want to read, can't read, or aren't even coherent information. And this second infinity is so much bigger than the first infinity that it is infinitely improbable that you will ever pick out a coherent book.
Everything you do in a coherent informational world is directed by sets of biases. Algorithmic recommendations are just another one of the tools used to traverse this infinite world, and if you understand the biases they impart you can use these tools successfully.
Ok but why "find me a book that explains how car insurance works" no find book that explains how car insurance works but find exactly one car insurance company?
Even a library with all the books ever written, even those forever lost to time, would be very much finite. And even if such a library was possible - I would really be careful in using the term such as infinity with anything that is in anyway dependant of physical resources - the first ”bias” or rather a filter limiting the books you can read would be the languages you can read. Then time you have to read it. Whether you understand the subject matter. Etc. This already starts to resemble an algorithm of sorts, yes.
I think the mistake you are making is that you believe you can know what decisions and on what basis algorithms on platform apps make for you. Well you cannot. First of all they have again and again been shown to have a hidden agenda’s and besides, they change all the time. In the end it is basically same as letting Zuck or Musk select everything you read.
Instead you can select your own algorithm. It is pretty simple, I did one at age of ten at our local library before I even knew what algorithm was. Only think I knew was that I really liked this book Hobbit by someone named JRR Tolkien.
I think in the next five years the internet will change drastically. Walled gardens, invite only, and companies that verify you're a human (I.E. use government identification).
There is now no way to tell if somebody online in a human or a robot. Even video/zoom/voice is no longer a distinguishable.
There could be a technology that cryptographically ensures that each letter/character came from a physical keypress/touch from a human when you want to interact with a human online in written form, but then again a robot could also be pressing the physical switches or interacting with a touchscreen.
I hope we'll develop more robust mechanisms for detecting non-human generated content (including text) that aren't only enforceable by law (e.g. labeling AI-generated content in the EU).
At the end of the day I see no path to human victory in a digital world.
It's kind of like a human moving to a planet with a nitrogen atmosphere. We have to wear a space suit to survive. No matter how much we slim it down, it's still a system on top of our existing systems.
The internet is the same. We have to put a digital suit on our analog meat to explore a digital world that is becoming crowded with evolving digital natives, and those natives are rapidly becoming smarter and better than us in these spaces.
The solution is simple, if unpalateable: No restrictions, but if its ever detected you are running a bot, you are punished in a way that ruins your life, without exception.
Are you the global government that is going to enforce this law? How do you establish identity? How can identity be revoked? How do you keep it from being an authoritarian nightmare?
I live 20 minutes metro ride away from the best coffee shop the entire Asia Pacific (awarded 2026), Only Coffee Project in Crows Nest, Sydney. And it's really, really good. But that level of quality is not particularly unique here.
Sydney and Melbourne are known to have the best coffee in the world on average. Italian immigrants came over and took what the Italians started and perfected it. McDonald's McCafe was conceptualised and started in Melbourne in 1993, because of Melbourne's strong coffee scene. Australia is the only country that Starbucks failed in, because the coffee here is already too good.
Having said all of this, I still think that about 2/3 of coffee being made by baristas in Sydney is undrinkable. If the beans aren't poor quality or stored incorrectly, the barista will use tap water that is too hard or soft, grind the beans on the wrong setting, over or underextract, overheat the milk until it denatures, not wipe out the previous grind from the portafilter (leading to an ugly, bitter flavour), and do many other little things that ruin the coffee.
I can literally walk into most coffee shops and hear the milk frother "screaming" as the proteins are being denatured. This is the coffee snob capital of the world, and most people still drink terrible coffee without giving it a second thought.
The average consumer doesn't have enough knowledge to have good taste. It's tragic. It sucks. We would have a better world if people cared just a tiny bit more about the things they consume. But they don't, because there isn't enough time and energy in their life to dedicate to truly looking into something.
And this is why I think that there will unfortunately be a demand for AI art. I don't want this to be the case. I hate it. I hope you do too. I hope we all demand higher standards from the art, culture, and goods that we consume.
But as long as people drink bad coffee, they'll read AI slop and recommend it to their friends. It's just how it is.
You've been downvoted, but I couldn't agree with you more!
Here in the UK, I've recently driven a few thousand miles on longer, road trip-style holidays. That has meant more time in service stations than I'm used to, and I'm shocked (but actually not surprised) at the low bar for everything... food, drink, hygiene; all at exorbitant prices. That's before we get to the bits that really indulge our chimp-brains like the fruit machines and "special, limited edition, collaboration-with-contemporary-film milkshake/slushy/burger" that are just complete marketing exercises.
I was left wondering why people accept this? Am I just a snob, or are people legitimately fine with this? One argument is that we're all struggling — financially, emotionally, existentially — and just trying to survive and get through the day. Who cares if this coffee is £7, loaded with sugar and fat to contribute to our systemic illnesses and contains only the barest minimum of lowest-quality coffee? _"It's a hit, and it gets me through."_
And I think this answers a lot! There's a line from the last Bond film, where the evil villain utters something like "people want oblivion, they want no choices and then to die when they're not looking". It's extreme (he's a Bond-baddie after all), but I don't think it's inaccurate. We're so accustomed to everything being a bit shit that we've collectively checked out and accept it. It explains why so much that would have once been unthinkable socially/politically/morally is now just "fine". AI replacing us in the workplace but also in our hobbies is just the next in a long line of insults.
Perhaps we need to put the French in charge for a while? Nothing a good revolution couldn't fix, and at least we'll be manning the barricades with a good coffee in hand...
I actually no joke had the idea of making this in Rust. Basically store snapshots of the history alongside an eventlog (binary file containing compressed chronological input events).
But the problem with this is that someone could write an agent to mimic a human. And if there is a financial incentive to prove that you're not AI, which there always will be, it is inevitable.
I've considered learning to handwrite to write my first drafts like that. But then I could use an AI to generate realistic looking scans of handwriting.
I guess I could physically mail the originals to a third party verifier. That's what it may come down to for creatives.
I cut out Social Media earlier this year, and it's been one of the best decisions I've made. Part of why I started was remembering that we didn't have doom-scrolling apps before smartphones. The change has been tremendous since I've been trying to go back to more "intentional" media. When I find myself distracted and wanting to pick up my phone, I realize there isn't really anything on it for me to do and am forced to just put it away. So I've started getting into the habit of keeping a book on me wherever I go. I've read 4 books this year!
Some people will quibble with the definition, but I agree with the spirit of this. I have pruned all my web traffic down to a few sites, and Hacker News and Reddit are the two that remain where I feel that pull for my attention. Hacker News is better than, say, TikTok, but I still find myself reaching for it to distract me from other things in my life. It is "easy". Like 24 hour news, the FOMO is still strong (you can always refresh and find some novelty), and reading a bunch of internet comments is a guaranteed cheap fix for dopamine (or whatever).
When I have experimented with banning these sites, I have felt a positive boost in my mental wellbeing, where I go back to being bored, which is great and leads to me doing more focused activities like reading more. I just don't know how to solve the "head in the sand" issue. This site has legitimately helped me in my career for example. I think I will land on a middle ground somewhere will be the ultimate answer, like catching up once per week or something.
There's a big difference between a forum where every visitor sees the same front page (more or less) and something like Facebook where every visitor sees a list of things curated just for them.
If you are only exposed to points of view that you already agree with, over time it's easy to forget that some people have other points of view (which are actually not always completely ridiculous, despite what you may have heard). Note that rage bait does not count as a divergent point of view; it's almost always a cherry-picked caricature, not anything close to a good faith representation.
This might not sound like such a big deal, but do that for billions of individuals and you have the perfect recipe for the political polarization we are currently enjoying.
It's less of a difference than you might suspect. The personalized curation is in which forum you choose to visit. HN is quite niche by numbers; it's a lot smaller than say bodybuilding.com or even AR15.com. That you choose to go to news.ycombinator.com is your personalization, and also skews your view on the world. Most of the world is interested in very different stuff.
Isn't that the whole point? That I have chosen to visit that and personalize? Otherwise, you could say all personalization skews the worldview, and you'd be technically right (the worst kind of right).
When you're talking political polarization on a societal level, it's a distinction without a difference. The distinction is that when you personalize by site, it's an explicit coarse-grained choice by the individual. When you personalize by algorithm, it's an implicit fine-grained choice by the individual, which is then aggregated and turned into an explicit stream of content by the algorithm. In both cases, you are adapting the content someone sees by what they want to see.
The sort of national unity that we took for granted between 1945-1995 (and to some extent from 1920-1945) was explicitly manufactured by mass media. Here technology presented the same content to all people, because it was cheaper to do it that way. Before the invention of consumer radios in 1920, we had a similar political polarization as we do today, if not even moreso. Also the Federal government was significantly weaker, lacking even powers like direct taxation, let alone the mass surveillance it has now.
>When you personalize by algorithm, it's an implicit fine-grained choice by the individual
I'd argue it's not so much a choice by the individual in that the individual often isn't consciously aware and may actually choose to use the same thing without the algorithm that pushes them towards things such as bubbles if that were even a clearly presented option.
Nah, it's just a news aggregator and discussion forum. I'm not here putting my life on display for everyone, and there isn't even a way for me to do that, so it's not social media. Not only do I not have a non-anonymous presence on this site, but there's not even info to link me to one, so it's still not social media... and not even close.
You know what they mean though. Don't be so dense. This feed is not algorithmically built to maximize engagement, and it has no eye-catching and bait-facilitating photos. Meaningfully different.
That realization - that you realize there's really nothing [worthwhile] for you to do - after getting over that initial break from your phone, is a magical threshold that I wish I'd crossed a lot sooner. The time and energy it frees up is so powerful, no matter what else you choose to do with it. Reading 4 books is incredible on its own but in this day and age it (and any other deliberate, non-scrolling activity) has incredible effects on your attention and emotional-balance, which I'm sure you've noticed.
Our minds seem to be more like LLMs than we probably like to imagine.
In some areas of life, technology and society have forced us to be more aware, of more things, more of the time. Our 'context' is filled with more things to consider, and attention is the window in. Sleep, schedule, and planning, helps to reset us and use context wisely.
Modern life forces a lot of context in, but we still have a lot of control over the rest of our daily 'attention windows' (like cutting out the excessive attention-grabbing media). It's kind of a rigid way to think, but there seems to be something there. We do have a saying afterall: 'what's on your mind?'
I appreciated the article: it was a good reminder to manage time wisely.
I have followed that up with removing all algorithmical feeds from my life (I recommend News Feed Eradicator extension for that) and then setting phone to Focused mode from 9am till 2pm. It's been life changing.
I thought people at work would be mad, but everybody adjusted instantly.
Next up I'd like to pre-plan blocks of focused work - an idea I got from the Deep Work book.
I'll object to "no doomscrolling" a little bit. My first case of doomscrolling was on my PC, in high-school, in early years of Facebook. It happened not with social feeds, but with news. I had this stupid idea that I need to follow news to "stay informed", and it took me I think a good year before I noticed I'm constantly sad, depressed, angry at, or afraid for the world. When I noticed, I cut news out completely. Mood massively improved, and two decades later, I still don't regret a thing. Plus, I realized some time later that reading news doesn't make you more informed, but more disinformed.
The sum total of things going on in the world is far more than any one human being can process. The function of the news media (either human or algorithmic) is to cherry-pick the stories that are presented to users. Because they are cherry-picked, they necessarily present a distorted picture of reality. In the days of the big-3 monopoly of broadcast TV, they were usually cherry-picked to support national unity and common American culture; as the news media got more competitive, they started cherry-picking ones that would hold viewer attention ("if it bleeds, it leads"), and then as we switched to Internet news and algorithmic feeds they are algorithmically chosen to maximize engagement.
- in bulk, it creates distorted view of reality, by overemphasizing dramatic events;
- individually, approximately half the headlines are bald-faced lies, and the other half merely click bait
- articles usually correct the lies in headlines, but in every case I could independently verify, the text was presenting heavily distorted view of the events
Some of that can be canceled out by following multiple independent sources, but frankly, doing that is IMO one of the biggest ways to waste your life I can think of. Not worth the effort. Meme sites have similar ROI, and are much more fun.
I came to a similar realisation as you and came up with 3 questions I ask when looking at any news article:
- Does this affect me in any way?
- Was this my fault?
- Can I do anything to change this?
I can't see why I should care about any event that doesn't meet a single one of these criteria, yet when I look at the front page of any news site barely any story passes this test
spreading awareness is a thing. A lot of people don't know what our politicians are doing to us which gives them even more freedom to do even worse, self-serving things.
HN is not a general news site. I am also, as you noted, "extremely active". Having conversations in HN comment threads is the diametrical opposite to scrolling through and reading world news and local news every morning and evening.
What's the point though? I'd like to think scrolling HN is healthier than Facebook. But is it better than curated subreddits, or Instagram/TikTok showing you stuff about your friends and hobbies?
I don't think it's pedantic to have a bit of self awareness, although engaging in the discussion instead of writing a pithy one liner would be better.
I don't see any technical difference? On HN, you scroll through an algorithmically generated list of submissions, vote them up and down, and post and vote on comments. This is pretty similar to FB. Just replace "cat videos" with "pelicans on bikes".
Basically I agree with your second point. I'd been hung up on the notion that people were maligning specific technical choices (and indeed there are sub-threads where this argument is being advanced), but that's not the case here. Y Combinator's goal with HN is to make money indirectly, by discreetly, almost implicitly advertising itself as an outfit at the centre of things of interest to the "higher end" of the tech field, who might then (a) absorb awareness of it by osmosis and later (b) think of it first when planning their next startup. As such its goals are much more closely aligned with what that crowd enjoys, than with maximising engagement and thus eyeballs on ads.
Everyone being served the same algorithmic results is a genuine technical difference (I believe; do we actually know that HN doesn't customise the front page for logged-in users?). I think it's quite a fine distinction, though -- both sites are trying to hold the user's attention, one just omits to use an available level of customisation. I have no moral objection to either approach.
I think it's half culture, half being text-based. HN is heavily self-correcting when it comes to low quality content, trolls, spammers, clickbait titles.
It feels very healthy how I can choose what to engage with, and what to ignore.
That's just your bias talking, though. Of course different people are going to have different opinions, but Facebook users feel the same way about Facebook, TikTok users feel the same way about TikTok. Anyone who didn't feel that way wouldn't use it.
I don't entirely understand the point you're making, but I disagree with the last part. People not only have different needs from the media they consume, they also aren't equally rational with how they decide what to consume.
talking about doomscrolling and how it would be better not to do it is one of the favourite pastimes of the doomscroller. loads of fb users hate it but struggle to believe they could do without it.
It's interactive. As in, we write and talk, often about articles posted. That's completely completely different than passively absorbing content spoon fed by Silicon Valley algorithms and sweetened with graphics, attractive people and sudden music and sounds.
I cut Facebook a while ago when I realized they wouldn't let me at what I want it for.
I'm glad Facebook told me about my classmate Eddie's death. We would never be friends but we knew each other and my life was better for having him in a class years ago. My only other chance is hope that it is discussed at a class reunion in a few years.
However Facebook wants to give me the 'you won't believe who is harming our children' overblown scare because that is what sells. I need to cut that garbage out of my life (others have discussed why in detail). Realistically Facebook has about five minutes of useful stuff per day, which doesn't make them money. However now I'm out so they get less.
Facebook actually became my preferred social site for a month or two recently - I had a relatively fresh account and managed to direct the algorithm towards mostly serving me interesting archeology, local groups, and some cute pet videos.
Then one day out of the blue it decided to serve me straight up white nationalist content out of the blue. It only happened for a day but the fact that it happened at all is horrifying when you think about that occurring on a global scale.
Now I only open maybe once a week for a minute to check messenger and I hope soon to be able to delete the app of my phone for good. I really worry about what we've unleashed on the world letting these billionaires capture our digital commons.
There are better forums than facebook for things like archeology, local groups, and pet videos. However everybody does them on Facebook these days and so we are stuck...
I gave up on facebook when it decided I wanted to see borderline child porn (the girl was wearing a diaper and positioned as if about to nurse from the topless mom - it might not meet the definition of child porn but it obviously trying to sit just above that line). When reported I was told the group is fine by Facebook's standards. But it isn't fine by mine.
A couple of years ago, I went the indie route (ex big tech). Prior to that I was absolutely allergic to social media and never really used them except maybe LinkedIn.
Sadly as an indie (or frankly anyone these days?) if you don’t have a social media following, you simply don’t exist. Distribution is one of - if not the most - important things to have, so farming social media is unavoidable. The worst part is that you can’t just post and go, these apps (and respective algorithms) expect you to use them regularly for your content to be shown to people.
Automating all of that is also super tricky since there are a billion bots out there. And the alternative being pay-to-win with expensive advertising.
Social media had one benefit: to connect with like-minded people during the madness of the covid era. Ironically, the madness was fed by social media, in part because it allowed groups of like-minded people to connect. Note: this comment holds true no matter which side you considered mad and which side you considered reasonable.
I did the same thing this year, and I agree it's been one of the best decisions I've made. I'm happier, and my mind feels calmer, with less noise. I've started reading a lot, and even writing (I started a blog, and one of my first posts was about exactly this, if you want you can check it out [1])
I've also tried to stay away from the news. I have a very long list of uBlock Origin filters [2] to hide certain words and topics on Reddit (even if its politically tangent, it gets blocked), and it works amazingly well. I hate that I have to go to such lengths to avoid the worst of the internet, but I love the freedom of mind I've gained, like really it feels liberating instead of boring.
One last thing: I've started to notice that the corporate claws are no longer in my head. On the train, I see something like 50–70% of people scrolling through algorithmically curated feeds, and I think about how much influence Zuck and company have over what so many people see and think, with almost no effort. The thing is, I feel like the "old man yells at cloud" meme, like I am the crazy person doing crazy things, but I feel better this way, so I will keep doing it.
We don't have protection from attention hijacking algorithms the same way workers didn't have protection until unions became a thing. AI can do more for consumers than Unions ever could (because it'll be more uniform). Currently there's no motivation (monetary or otherwise) to make this tech easily available to the masses - and when it does the bad actors and dark pattern wizards will miss the good ole days when only the select few had access to these patterns.
The Mosaic browser (1993) had full text history search.
We then got a bookmark system that was every bit as terrible as a web directory.
It stayed that way. The delicious search revenue made organizing websites uninteresting. That obscure website you enjoyed a decade ago but don't even remember, they had lots of traffic like you. No point updating or keeping it online. You can't have rss in Firefox but here is a Facebook like button in your address bar in stead.
I've tried to maintain the bookmark menu but I rarely use it since everything is dead. Why aren't browsers storing a text version of the bookmark? Did people in 1993 have more resources than us? Should I be afraid it grows to a few GB over the decades?
A good few dead websites have a backup some place but there is no automation to find it. If you had a string of text from a page you might be able to search for it. If the page found is highly similar we might automate the process to have alternative location for bookmarks with a nice warning dialog.
Your chain of thoughts is dangerous, because once you realize that can you can cache website content locally, you might also want to share this cache with your friends so that traffic is reduced ;)
It can be optional. The owner of the website should get to decide what people do with their stuff. They can provide a tracker and (as long as it is alive) chose if to burn its own bandwidth or point you at a seed. [Dynamic] ads can still be inserted and blocked as usual. Should be funny to make money from a website that you don't even host anymore. Default browsers can also respect legal take down orders if they are published on the website.
A whole different world from posts vanishing into the social media memory hole.
W3C's Amaya browser [1] was as much an editor as it was a browser. Production and consumption were supposed to be symmetrical. This was the promise of the web.
Instead we turned it into a worse version of television, where you still only consume passively what is fed to you while being watched and analysed.
Bookmarks died because most humans are allergic to having to do bookkeeping and cleanup tasks that are incidental to what they really want to do.
We see that over and over again, in a bunch of non-tech fields. My kids never want to clean up their toys; they will pull out new ones, but it is a struggle to get them into the habit of putting the old ones away first. My parents used to keep a notebook with every gas fill-up they made; nobody born after about 1990 does that anymore. We were taught how to balance a checkbook in elementary school; basically nobody does that anymore, we put everything on autopay and if you are diligent you check a statement or import it into Quicken once a month (most people don't even do that, they have no idea what they are spending and predictably, usually no money left over). GMail succeeded because instead of putting your mail in folders, you just leave it in one lump with Google and rely on full-text search. A lot of Zoomer computer users don't even know what files and folders are, they just use apps, which take them straight to what they want to do and don't offer things like possession of your own data.
Back in the (~early 2010s) days when Google still allowed internal innovation, there were recurrent demos produced by engineers of full-text search over your web history, though of course it was your web history as stored by Google and none of this was local. It never became a product, largely because users are too lazy to go to a separate search product just for your history, or because they're too lazy to check a separate box saying "Search my history". Instead I think web history became a ranking input to general search and it would mix in results that you frequently visited to the general results, which honestly I think was a more useful approach.
i had invested a lot into del.icio.us and other similar systems but what really killed bookmarks for me was the instability of URIs and how hard it was to search for the right page based on a title or bookmark name and not the contents. At the time, google was really really effective at search.
I gave up on my book because after a couple decades I didn't have a good answer. Sure I could brag about the one full-up where I got 57mpg, and I knew about the one where it was only 36 - who cares.
Back in the 1930s the book was probably useful because changes in mpg were a sign you needed to do a tuneup early. But back then everybody knew a tuneup was every few months and once in a while something went off in between. Cars are a lot more reliable.
1. To monitor gas mileage primarily. Any sudden decline in gasoline mileage can warn of impending engine component failure,
2. keeping receipts ensures that if there is a problem and your engine is damaged, then you can show where you bought the fuel,oil or component and get recompense. This is rare but does happen and it can be a costly repair. Examples are:
- bad gasoline - usually debris or water. Can stop fuel flow and cost you replacement of a gas filter at the least.
- incorrect oil change - you pay for an oil change but they don't put on a new oil filter or they add the wrong kind of oil or they add too little oil or they add too much oil. Don't discount the last one: too much oil can damage the engine seriously. I once had a dealer oil change and, prior to service, explicitly warned the mechanic that the engine was a rare model and required less oil than most models: nonetheless he overfilled it. Luckily I spotted the difference immediately b/c the engine ran like shite right out of the garage. I made a freeway U-turn,drove back in, re-explained the car's needs and insisted they drain off the overfill and let me check it. The mechanic tried to cover his ass by treating it as another "crazy customer" but I just told his companions that
a) he'd fucked up and
b) I had specifically warned him about the problem earlier so
c) they'd better keep an eye on him - he wasn't as good as they were.
3. If you sell a car, buyers love getting the records proving that you bought good oil/gas, performed maintenance, etc. FWIW most buyers do not continue to maintain such records in my experience.
I don't maintain a log book and I know only one person who does. But I file receipts for gas, parts, fluids, filters and major maintenance for each vehicle.
I did this for a couple of years but after my mileage didn't budge regardless of summer/winter/car age/mechanical work I got bored and stopped recording :-)
These apologetic “no fan of musk”, “before Elon became crazy” are tiresome.
You got a Tesla, just own it.
We liked the guy when he started that electric car thing, now it’s different but he’s no mass murderer.
I'm not apologizing for having a Tesla, I just want it to be clear that I'm not an Elon fan boy. You don't have to go far on the internet to find people praising Tesla cars for things that are not really that impressive. When Cybercab launched there were people who were making memes that cybercab was the "cool" robotaxi because there weren't sensors everywhere like Waymo.
But it's also important to not let fanboyism cloud judgment. Tesla has great software.
That and google had a major interest in killing bookmarks. Bookmarks were actively competing with google search traffic, so they put in a lot of effort to get you to stop using them. Why bookmark something when you can just search for it.
As an alternative to Gmail can I recommend Hotmail? I recently created an account and a nice feature is that all new email goes into the Junk folder by default. It was obviously designed by a misanthropic hermit, but the benefit is that your emails drop to almost zero. It's a bit of a bummer if you had a job opportunity or a friend tries to contact you, but on the other hand, fewer distractions.
Same. My very first email with them was deleted, because I was using it via POP3 instead of logging into the site. I should probably just self-host an email for junk, then I can remove the very last Microsoft thing in my life.
> My kids never want to clean up their toys; they will pull out new ones, but it is a struggle to get them into the habit of putting the old ones away first.
Yes, as kids probably always did since the invention of the children's room. The usual solution was to educate - and push - them until they hopefully started to understand the benefits that an orderly room can give you and maybe even had some fun thinking of a good ordering scheme by themselves.
Only in tech would the response to kids being too lazy to clean up their rooms be "oh well obviously keeping your stuff in order is an unworkable strategy".
I remember that, back when we were in school, we would actually spend a lot of time structuring the bookmark folder, making elaborate menu hierarchies. Doing this the first time was fun.
The problem was, this lasted about until the first time the PC had to be reinstalled or someone switched the browser or something else caused the bookmarks menu to be lost. Redoing all that stuff after it got wiped was much more of a chore than doing it initially.
But this would be my takeaway here: If software developers want their users to manage their own ordering schemes or use customization features, make it easy and convenient to do - and for the love of everything, threat the resulting bookmark trees, settings files etc as critical data that has to be synced, backed-up etc. If it has to be redone after a few updates or a crash, then no one will use it.
(Incidentally, tech companies have absolutely no problem "educating" their users if the behavior is something they care about. I'm pretty sure, no product or marketing person ever said "oh well, it sure would be nice if all our users made accounts or installed our app, but they're far too lazy for that, so that's a nonstarter...")
>If software developers want their users to manage their own ordering schemes or use customization features, make it easy and convenient to do
This is akin to telling parents that if they want to their children to clean their rooms, you should make it easy and convenient to do. Obviously this is non-sensical: if you make a mess it might be hard and inconvenient work. Thats why kids don't do it!
I find some tech criticisms to be simply inane; the tech companies are not going to absorb the costs of educating users or fixing unworkable strategies. Not because Bezos needs to buy another yacht, but because the companies that try to do that all die before they get big. There is a giant graveyard of startups who have tried to be the "responsible and patient parent", and they have all died. Users don't want to put up with it, and if given the option will run to the company that just handles everything for them with a subscription fee or reselling their data.
Yeah, imo the only way this is changing at all is if for some reason organization is inherent to the value offered. I guess Notion kinda did that, Obsidian too.
> This is akin to telling parents that if they want to their children to clean their rooms, you should make it easy and convenient to do. Obviously this is non-sensical [...]
Doing exactly that, by coming in and helping them with it (initially doing most of the work) as they get into the habit if it being a regular task, actually seems to work pretty well (at least, in the n=1 experiment conducted with my son).
Not sure what the basis for “obviously non-sensical” is, other than the (very common) fetishization of struggle.
> oh well obviously keeping your stuff in order is an unworkable strategy
Volume makes all the difference. If you could only visit sites you bookmarked first and you had only say 200 bookmark limit, you’d keep your bookmarks in perfect order.
That’s an occupant completely ridiculous proposition in 2024; in 2027 you’ll only need to bookmark the AI chatbot services you pay for, because the rest of the internet will become completely unusable by humans.
Organization (like other hard / unpleasant things) is something that people will do if 1) it helps them and 2) there's no other way.
What tech companies understand well is that if a competitor takes away people's pain and you don't, people will use that competitor.
It was technically possible to copy mp3s one by one to a USB mp3 player, and many people did if they had no other options, but marking an artist in iTunes for sync was a lot easier, so consumers preferred iPods. And managing syncing and purchasing itself was a chore, which Spotify proved was entirely unnecessary to the music listening experience for most people.
Sure, there's a small but loud minority for whom the process of purchasing / organizing music itself is enjoyable, and that minority will often try to push their views on everybody else, but the majority of the population wants a "magic box" where they can type "Taylor Swift" and get Taylor Swift music to play. Or they just want "radio, but without the battery drain, commercials, useless yapping and inability to skip songs they don't like."
No, I was the kid over there playing librarian and sorting all my books and games by author and year. Legos and Knex were also prime sorting targets, but the real joy came from getting random jars of buttons or beads. Getting one of those shelves with 100 tiny drawers was like a recipe for heaven.
Isn’t it more optimal, from the perspective of play, to have them spread out?
I can see the argument that if you clear your desk, you’ll be more inclined to draw because you have the space. But if I didn’t impose that value, they wouldn’t necessarily draw. They’d just play with something else.
I don’t track my fuel usage. I did once. Economically, I don’t need to. The car tells me my MPG anyway, literally, if I care to look.
Accounts are harder to track now, with fewer physical assets and more renting and subscriptions.
The point you make seems to be that rigidity in the system would bring value. But I think the values people have often exist outside the system. The system is imposing an idea of what is worth tracking or organising in the first place.
Oddly, I think LLMs are quite intentional in their current incarnation. You start with an empty input box, state a curiosity, and go looking for information. There’s very little imposed structure around what you should care about.
That changes once OpenAI et al. start tracking what you do and recommending what you should be looking at before you’ve even formed the intention yourself.
Its better for them to put away Toy A before breaking out Toy B. If you dont teach them this habit, you will spend your entire day cleaning up Toys A-Z strewn all over the place. Children need to learn to clean up after themselves, its a failure on the parents part, especially if they force the other older siblings to be the clean up crew.
Same! When I started driving I continued the trend until I got an app that did it for me, then cars started doing it for me, then I switched to an EV and it does some calculations that I never bothered trying to understand.
I have an obsession with record keeping and sorting and categorization. Problem is, I don't actually have the patience to categorize because its often multi dimensional and analog versions of categorizing only allow for single dimension (you cant put a document in more than one folder for example)
Now I have LLMs build me tiny apps that let me upload docs and images with local processing and human verification.
But categorizing is fine if you can put multiple categories on things. That's the whole difference between flexible tagging and rigid folder, i.e. the one thing GMail got right vs. the real world analog of a folder.
The real world solves it too btw. in the same way a relational database did: Indexes ;) Tagging is nothing but different indexes of the same underlying thing. Be it a book or an email or whatever else.
And this top level comment is actually weird to me. Maybe I'm just a non-Chrome-user? I use Firefox. I never bookmark anything any longer. I literally just know what to type to get to what I need to from the history. Like HN. I literally just type n into a new tab and HN is the first suggestion based on how often/recently I went here. No manual bookmarking or anything non-local needed.
Similarly at work I just know how to find certain things by typing into the search bar. And it even learns from recency. Our app URLs recently changed and I had to start typing the new unique parts of the URL recently for a few tries until it went up in the recency bias calculation. Sure like I had to scroll down a few entries in the history search a few times. Now I just know what to type to get where I want to again.
I see others struggle with rigid bookmark structures that they can't find anything in like ever on the regular though (URL change or not) :( And (at least with firefox) those bookmarks would even get searched too! Of course, unlike history they would have to manually update bookmarks. I really don't get it how people even still use bookmarks any longer.
I personally dont usually use bookmarks unless its something truly obscure that I may want to refer to later (like an article or something.)
I like the concept of indices but a lot of indices i see (like in textbooks) are incomplete. I have to think "ok what might be related to this?" And it certainly is not an easy problem!
That's not the problem of the concept of an index. It's bad implementation. If your index only indexes as if it were a static folder structure, then you have to think exactly like the guy that built the index. If you instead allow multiple indexes/index entries for the same underlying thing, then you have tagging.
Bookmarks are folder structure. Theoretically you can bookmark the same thing under a different part of the structure of course. I've never really seen people do that though, except accidentally because they found something the liked, bookmarked it in on place, later found it again, didn't remember they already bookmarked it and bookmarked it in a different part of their folder structure. In a way they also "tagged" except that the actual bookmark, the thing is not the same. It's a copy. If your bookmark goes to some address that might change while pointing to the same actual thing, you'd now have to update (and first find) a multitude of bookmarks in your folder structure.
The last startup I worked for (Edvo, since shut down) was actually trying to solve this, not in a bookmarking way but in a way that was like "bookmarks represent knowledge or ideas" and was meant to be a graph-based mind mapping tool.
The tech was cool, but I think they ran into the issue you just suggested - people dont really bookmark, and it was hard to make people see it as anything other than a bookmarking tool with categorization.
There are aptitude tests for those two traits: Analytical Reasoning and Ideaphoria at Johnson O'Connor. You, like me, probably will score high on both.
> most humans are allergic to having to do bookkeeping and cleanup tasks that are incidental to what they really want to do.
Yes, and that's IMO perfectly understandable. What was that greeting card text? "A clean apartment is a sign of a wasted life."
Not from the US, we didn't have "balancing the checkbook" over here, but watching my parents and grandparents, and trying to mimic them growing up, I have a distinct impression that all that bookkeeping - from budgeting to gas refills to blood pressure measuerments (which my grandfather did diligently in his final decade of life) - was done as much of immediate necessity as it was of habit.
People did their book-keeping by hand because there was no external authoritative source to track it for them, but also because they needed to know - there were consequences for not knowing some numbers or their history on-demand. As soon as either becomes false, people stop. Very few people I know "keep books" for their individual spending - and it's not because auto-pay, it's because the bank gives you that information for free, effortlessly, in near real-time. The bank is now the authoritative source of how much money you have.
(That's the "external authoritative source". Auto-pay is a masssive QoL improver, but it's a consequence, not cause. The cause here is achieving "not really needing to know" by keeping your earnings higher than spendings. Then you literally don't need to care about money day-to-day, and only check balance when you're planning larger purchases - and then manually paying bills is basically "sign of a wasted life".)
> A lot of Zoomer computer users don't even know what files and folders are, they just use apps, which take them straight to what they want to do and don't offer things like possession of your own data.
That's a problem - but zooming out a bit, back to "bookmarks", the problem is that sometimes you need to do some book-keeping yourself - you may have your own reasons to need to know, and there is no authority other than you. Unfortunately, it turns out, modern software is then useless, because it doesn't stop at not requiring users to keep things tidy - they purposefully don't ship the necessary tools and affordances to keep things tidy.
I think bookmarks, files, and folders (to nostrademons point) is too coarse an abstraction for different organization domains. Music ks a good example. Most people want to organize by album, artist, year, genre, or song title. Files and folders or bookmark trees can mimic that structure but can't replace it. I like to order my photos by outing or by subject.
In either cases while you can reify your organizational system into files and folders it's just inferior to a personal classification system.
Personal classification is key, I guess, because your two examples are alien to me.
> Music ks a good example. Most people want to organize by album, artist, year, genre, or song title.
I assumed this is because that's what software is limited to, and people cope, and the only people who really organize like that were the record stores owners. Because personally, this in no way even resembling how I think of my music collection, or how I pick what to listen to.
For me it's usually by theme, personal "feels like they belong together" connection, causal relationships (e.g. music from the same trip I went to in high school), or artist but defined loosely, I.e. tolerant of the fact that artists collaborate and perform together.
> I like to order my photos by outing or by subject.
Outing, yes, but by-subject is alien to me. Most of my photos have exactly zero people, or anywhere from 2 to 20+. Single subject photos are oddity, and I rarely feel the need to organize by them. Events, then by date, then maybe by location.
In both cases search turns out to be the answer, but with photos it's phenomenally unreliable due to vendor fucking with or stripping metadata.
I think the best approach is still files with embedded metadata (eg. EXIF for images/videos, ID3v2 for MP3s, resource forks in classic MacOS apps). That way you store, organize, and move around the content as a unit, and then you can display it in whatever way you want. And you can write new apps to display things differently as consumer tastes change.
Apple really got the intuition that files and folders aren't the "natural" way to organize things for most people.
For Office-style documents, there's no better way (except for search and recents), because everybody has different needs and deals with very different kinds of documents. For things that are more standardized, like music or photos, people want to think in terms of artists, albums and playlists, not in terms of some meticulously-maintained folder hierarchy.
Folders have some nifty properties, like good deletion handling, permissions management and intuitive movement from and to different drives, but they don't outweigh the advantage of specialized entities for most people.
I strongly disagree with this. In fact, of the many sins of Apple, removing files from iOS as concept is probably my largest pet peeve.
Most people don't have a problem with files. You learn what a file is in your first computer class day and you're done with it.
Files are not just about organization, primarily, they are the fundamental unit of information. They decouple data storage from processing, transformation, and transfer. It's how we give physicality to information. They give the user freedom in multiple ways:
- Freedom to open the file with whatever program I want, allowing me to experience it however (with a player), but also to create derivative works (in an editor).
- Freedom to store the file wherever I want, both locally or remotely.
- Freedom to share the files with others, via whatever mechanism I want.
Without files, computing is just about individual consumption. You don't own anything. That song you bought? You don't own it, it's some kind of abstract entity in Apple Music. The only thing you can do with it is press play. Living in an OS without files is like living in an universe where everything is liquid and containers of any kind are forbidden, all you can do is open the tap and drink straight from the stream.
Even if you create something? It's locked in some kind of vacuum that Apple controls. Wanna back it up? Pay Apple for Apple cloud. Wanna share it with someone? Figure it out, probably step one is to ask them to buy an Apple device.
I laugh whenever people say that Apple is "easier". The contortions I've seen people do just to get stuff from one device to another even within their own ecosystem.
The tragedy of all of this is that people that live in mobile are becoming less capable with technology over time. People talk of "the digital native" generation but kids these days know way less capable with machines than their parents. It used to be that everyone and their cousin knew how to use a P2P program, to burn a CD, to use external drives. Now you ask someone to send you some trip pictures and they'll just WhatsApp them to you. If you ask them to send you the high res originals they look at you with amazement: files? formats? compression? what's that???
This resonates with me. I record every purchase I make and every bill I pay in a budgeting app. 90% of the process is automated. So, there's very little I have to do once the budget categories, the goals and limits are set. The system works for me, it gives me certainty and peace of mind with very little effort. Yet, every relative and friend that hears about it treats me as a freak despite them being the ones complaining about money and not knowing "where the money goes every month". It's a lost cause.
Pairs up with my EU and Revolut bank perfectly, auto imports transactions, most of which you can set rules that auto assign to categories. And as they said 90% is automated, I just categorize a few transactions a week manually.
I tried something like envelope budgeting before in excel but didn't work really since I was lazy to manually add transactions, this is much easier. Budegting for a house and a USA trip without worries now :)
Several budgeting apps use open banking api to connect to bank accounts and update the entries (money in or money out). Once it's synced you can assign the appropriate category. Usually, the budgeting app "learns" over time and it does the categorisation automatically based on the payee and your budget.
The system isn't perfect but, in my experience, it works 90% of the time. The remaining 10% requires manual categorisation. I suppose it also depends on how simple or complex your budget and your spending are.
I don't use bookmarks because what's the point in saving a link to something.
Am I going to scroll through and find it later? Barely functions with text search due to only minimal metadata (maybe a title).
Worse still, I used to use bookmarks for things I wanted to return to, but now they're all dead links pretty much.. so now I have to go through and get disappointed because something interesting has now gone.
Users have to see the value of it. Some never grow up to organize their things but we can do a lot automatically. I think as the volume of things grows you first want
- a flat list of items, then you want
- folders (or categories), beyond that you want
- tag clouds, beyond those you want
- keyword and strong search, beyond that you want
- natural language queries.
Or any combination of those.
(There are more ways to organize/sort but I either don't know where to put them or they serve a specific type of data. I like the file system representation where each file and folder is a box the size of its size.)
Doing some of it by hand allows a workshop with more tools while preserving sanity.
The actual goal is actually really simple. There clearly is an agenda to get rid of any and all user generated media asap. Anything that works in the opposite direction will help reclaim the users executive function.
When creating a software or other products I always jokingly ask myself what kind of people I want to target and what I want to make them into. The joke is the limited room.
Building your own library should obviously be more awesome than borrowing. It might take the user a decade to see it but when they are old those child hood activities are a joy to be reminded of.
Same reason an ATM gives you the card back before the money because too many people would forget to cleanup (picking up the card) once they reach their objective (getting money).
But what if they update the webpage to something completely different from what you bookmarked? Wouldn't you like to have access to the most up-to-date version always? /s
I am pretty sure early versions of the Safari browser (in the 2000s) did in fact store a full-text version of every webpage in the history and allow you to search that. I even remember looking at the plist files where Safari stored all the extracted text.
I relied on that a lot until one day a random system update deleted all my old browsing history.
I have this with websites I read a few months ago, stuff from 1993 that is still alive is pure luck at this point. Nothing more frustrating than wanting to share a link with a colleague that you have seen recently and remember a couple of cribs from but that doesn't stand out enough in the history to ring a bell.
I just discovered https://hister.org/ (I think from a link here on hacker news) ... it solves the full text history search really really well.
- Local go server to index everything into sqlite or postgres
- browser extension to send the DOM for indexing.
- This happens after each page is finished rendering, so client side rendering doesn't break, and it doesn't require fetching the url a second time on the back-end.
- Filter rules to control what gets indexed (basic url regex patterns, nothing too fancy)
- Text-based query interface for terminal dwellers like me.
- Local file indexing that actually works well so that you can search your history and your documents in one place.
- Custom extractors for understanding specific sites and file formats.
It's really great, just about perfect for my needs.
I tried it after seeing that link here and it's been really useful. I happened to find myself in the type of situation where I'd need such a system after a couple days and it managed to keep the (volatile) info I wanted. Good stuff!
Back in 2012 I switched almost entirely from bookmarking to web clipping into Evernote, which has been great. Evernote itself has gone downhill, and at some point soon I'll probably migrate my collection to Obsidian (which has its own web clipper), but I'm still a big advocate of the general practice. It is indeed great to have a searchable record of stuff you've bookmarked vs just a tree of links that you'll soon forget exist.
The "www" browser still compiles without errors today along with an assortment of other utilties. I use these with a TLS forward proxy
I use the W3C programs to retrieve HTML but not to view it. For reading HTML I use a contemporary text-only browser
"www" is a 671.0K static binary for me
I'm a text-only browser user for 30+ years so I'm probably biased in favor of text. I routinely save HTML pages from webites I find useful, almost always as plain text. No resources. This makes sesnse for me because plain text is how I search and consume information. Firefox and other popular browsers generally do not save pages as plain text, they have always attempted to save as HTML along with page resources. But I'm not interested in images, fonts, CSS, Javascript, etc. Today I notice some people writing headlless browsers, like h5i, now output pages as markdown or some "machine-readable" format
I use my bookmark tab. I am not particularly interested in storing a copy of almost any of the links I have in my bookmark tab (why would I want a copy of some Grafana instance?)
I do get that for some people it's about research and collecting documents. For me it's basically "quick access to the most recent version of the thing at this URL"
I have a wallabag setup for my interesting bookmarks, and it downloads and indexes the contents of these bookmarks.
I read the contents later in a PocketBook, free of distractions from the normal devices.
It is a bit of setup work, but just totally frictionless after it was setup.
Firefox also has Pocket, which I used before switching to wallabag.
Browsers should've had tab groups decades ago, and bookmarks in a group should've gone into that group's corresponding bookmark folder by default. Voluntary tab groups use time at the user's convenience, while organizing bookmarks into folders tend to be a distraction or chore.
> Do you want to watch a video? YouTube knows you like cooking and art streams. But why not also recommend a few clips about the stock market bubble, global warming, and the war in Iran.
I'm always fascinated when people claim YouTube pushes content like this. It's an extremely common take, but I don't think it's true.
My experience has been that if I stop clicking something, the algorithm soon stops recommending it. It occasionally brings back a blast from the past--e.g. I watched a sumo competition once, and once in a blue moon it recommends another. But you can downvote bad recommendations, and I simply don't get recommendations for ideas I've never engaged with before.
FWIW I'm not saying the algorithm is great. My feed is absolutely worthless right now, but it's all goofy Japanese content because one of my kids is extremely into that right now. There's zero political content because she isn't showing any interest in it. Heck, most of the stuff isn't even in English anymore.
It's actually quite easy. If you watch something and you don't want more of it, delete it from your watch history. If it's particularly bad, you can block the channel entirely. I do this a lot for obvious AI slop content. Only subscribe to channels that are worth watching. Now my YouTube feed is almost too boring -- it's only showing me stuff in a pretty narrow set of interests and channels. I see very little outrage bait, celebrity news, "influencers," or politics.
Same. I don't think I remember the last time I came across actually "FAR right propaganda" recommended by an algorithm. Could be that the author and I differ in what "far right" means.
The only thing I watch on youtube.com is music stuff (electronic, industrial) and occasional tech stuff like some retro computing stuff or such. I very rarely use it. I just went to the home page to see an example because I was curious. One of the recommended videos about 3 rows down? "Donald Trump Recruits Rambo To End The Iran War". It's AI slop. I watch NOTHING about politics or similar on here. Nothing about the US or war things or anything. "The algorithm" is doing exactly what your quoted snippet indicated, scarily enough.
I wrote [something extremely similar](https://blog.scoopy.zone/posts/attention/) a bit ago. It is much harder to accomplish, but like the article says, you can still experience an Internet like the past.
Peak internet was the brief period of time when it was available but we weren't permanently connected. It was an intentional decision to log on, do what you wanted to do, and then disconnect.
rms (Stallman) used to (still does?) do that where he would download the web requests and emails on a daily basis and then work offline the rest of the day and then sync overnight. At least that's what I remember reading.
I remember thinking about how different that workflow is but it must be incredibly productive. Everything would be lightning fast (even stable Internet isn't always snappy and sometimes it's a chore) and there would basically be zero inline ads or any context switches.
> "I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it."
One way to do this is by going mobile-internet only with limited data. It doesn't stop doomscrolling on sites like this, but it does stop TV and online gaming and that could be very helpful for many people.
"intentional web surfing" is a phrase i've been exploring recently. hosting an event to turn it into an activity here in my city, should be interesting to see how people respond.
For the same reasons we left forums in the first place.
Spam was just a very small part of why people left forums. Size of the community and network effects was one of them. A constant stream of activity on any subject you wanted was yet another. Not having to log in to 40 different places yet another.
I use SelfControl for Mac and set the down time to around 15 days. No Youtube no news sites etc. Except HN. It's helped a lot, after a week you can notice measurable change in attention and habit and productivity. SelfControl lets you add 48 hrs to your blocked time repeatedly, so you can get to a 15 day mark pretty easily through repeated mouse clicks.
I don't think social media is inherently bad. For me, the measure is whether I'm wallowing in consuming rather than doing. Although, yes, it's easy to get lost in consuming, doing takes much more intent/attention.
I mean it's no different saying a river is inherently bad. We need them for water for survival. What is inherently bad is the maelstrom of a raging torrent seeking to pull you under so no one ever sees your body again. This is what a lot of the platforms have evolved into.
> LinkedIn will bury any relevant career news between the opinion of complete strangers. It is surely just a coincidence that those strangers happen to be shilling whatever Microsoft is invested in at the moment.
The browser extension LinkOff makes the feed much more bearable, even useful. [1]
Also, though I dislike the posts that LI pushes into my feed, I've never gotten the sense that this was motivated by a desire to boost Microsoft's investments. Perhaps I just wasn't paying attention, or am not cynical enough?
This is a story of enshittification but... I don't see any of it and neither should anyone who reads HN:
* adblocking is simple both in browser and on the dns level,
* revanced youtube allows you to even skip sponsored segments, regular ads don't deserve a mention, you will see none,
* reddit hasn't been good in forever, it's why we're here,
somehow Twitter/Spotify/YouTube/TikTok algos work just fine for me with this one simple trick: I watch the good stuff, and skip/block/mute the not-so-good stuff. This works less well on LinkedIn but it's a Microsoft product, what did you expect, really.
If you're like me, ie. on Hacker News daily, the modern Internet is a never ending series of wonders with virtually none of the inconvenience. And if on some absolute edge, you must use a website that sucks, both Claude and ChatGPT can drive a browser nowadays.
I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment expressed in this post. Our attention is extremely valuable (both to us and to advertisers), and consumers today broadly squander it.
For consumer digital products, the only business model that seems to work is advertising, because consumers are cheap and refuse to pay money for software. But the result is that they instead trade something far more valuable for the software, which is their attention.
The products that get built, as a result, are supremely well-engineered to attract and retain attention, to the detriment of their users. Most of the "news" that reaches us these days is not at all an attempt to actually educate us about the state of the world. Instead its just a collection of inflammatory and enraging facts that are chosen to optimize for engagement (to hold your attention)
In theory, someone could rebuild an ecosystem where people stopped squandering their attention and monetized it with money, but this would require consumers to stop chronically undervaluing their time and overvaluing their money.
I think the funny (and somewhat scary) thing about ad-supported platforms is that both the creators of the platform and the customers implicitly agree that the content just isn't that valuable. They know that if they paywalled the platform and forced people to make that value judgement then barely anyone would pay.
Which is kind of scary where you realise people spend hours and hours each day watching youtube slop, tiktok, instagram reels, while also subconsciously feeling "this content is worthless and I wouldn't pay $10 a month to keep watching it".
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 26.7 ms ] threadYes. But--change your thoughts, change your life: https://thinkhuman.com/change-your-thoughts-change-your-life...
They do, and it's annoying that even apps for "real work" do the same thing by flashing notifications/tips in your face, advertising a new feature you don't want to use right now, or warning you that everything is about to break soon.
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> You didn’t really have one big app that you could open and order it to entertain you. Instead, you had a few dozen of bookmarks to websites, each with a specific idea in mind.
This overlooks how common custom homepages such as Lycos, Yahoo! and My MSN were and how the browsers pushed these as their default home pages.
While they are not as addictive as "the algorithm" of today, they were still packed with clickbait images/links to attract your attention and ads to drain your wallet.
MSN: https://web.archive.org/web/20021108094511/http://www.msn.co...
My MSN: https://web.archive.org/web/20021107081016/http://my.msn.com...
I’ll also going to declare that doom scrolling-ish working on non-impactful personal projects is as BAD as doom scrolling twitter.
That the person might not like seeing the perfect offer is less important than filling the hole in the economy.
But working on non-impactful personal projects is also not as bad as doomscrolling twitter. Personal projects are a good way to build skill and grow your own confidence. Twitter doesn't build anything of significance.
[1] https://www.perlego.com/book/1536286/the-ecology-of-attentio...
This is just the illusion of choice. Not only that attention was already being monetized. Digital advertising didn't start with algorithmic feeds.
100% agree, and this is exactly why I disable any sort of algorithmic recommendations on the platforms I’m active on. I do this either through the app itself or by using those platforms on the web and hiding distracting elements with an extension like uBlock or AdGuard.
My final feed consists only of channels/profiles I directly follow. Oh, and there’s also RSS…
I really recommend everyone do the same. It really clears your head.
You walk up to the interface of an infinite digital library. In this library there are an infinite amount of books that you'd like to read, or even contain anything coherent for you to read. The problem is there is also an infinite amount of books you don't want to read, can't read, or aren't even coherent information. And this second infinity is so much bigger than the first infinity that it is infinitely improbable that you will ever pick out a coherent book.
Everything you do in a coherent informational world is directed by sets of biases. Algorithmic recommendations are just another one of the tools used to traverse this infinite world, and if you understand the biases they impart you can use these tools successfully.
...because advertising
I think the mistake you are making is that you believe you can know what decisions and on what basis algorithms on platform apps make for you. Well you cannot. First of all they have again and again been shown to have a hidden agenda’s and besides, they change all the time. In the end it is basically same as letting Zuck or Musk select everything you read.
Instead you can select your own algorithm. It is pretty simple, I did one at age of ten at our local library before I even knew what algorithm was. Only think I knew was that I really liked this book Hobbit by someone named JRR Tolkien.
if i want to read them all, I don't need help choosing. any book is one I want to read!
if I don't want to read them, I already have opinions. I should just pick one that I do want to read.
and I don't have opinions I can just ask someone for a recommendation.
big libraries existed before algorithmic recommendations, and people managed.
There is now no way to tell if somebody online in a human or a robot. Even video/zoom/voice is no longer a distinguishable.
There could be a technology that cryptographically ensures that each letter/character came from a physical keypress/touch from a human when you want to interact with a human online in written form, but then again a robot could also be pressing the physical switches or interacting with a touchscreen.
I hope we'll develop more robust mechanisms for detecting non-human generated content (including text) that aren't only enforceable by law (e.g. labeling AI-generated content in the EU).
It's kind of like a human moving to a planet with a nitrogen atmosphere. We have to wear a space suit to survive. No matter how much we slim it down, it's still a system on top of our existing systems.
The internet is the same. We have to put a digital suit on our analog meat to explore a digital world that is becoming crowded with evolving digital natives, and those natives are rapidly becoming smarter and better than us in these spaces.
Sydney and Melbourne are known to have the best coffee in the world on average. Italian immigrants came over and took what the Italians started and perfected it. McDonald's McCafe was conceptualised and started in Melbourne in 1993, because of Melbourne's strong coffee scene. Australia is the only country that Starbucks failed in, because the coffee here is already too good.
Having said all of this, I still think that about 2/3 of coffee being made by baristas in Sydney is undrinkable. If the beans aren't poor quality or stored incorrectly, the barista will use tap water that is too hard or soft, grind the beans on the wrong setting, over or underextract, overheat the milk until it denatures, not wipe out the previous grind from the portafilter (leading to an ugly, bitter flavour), and do many other little things that ruin the coffee.
I can literally walk into most coffee shops and hear the milk frother "screaming" as the proteins are being denatured. This is the coffee snob capital of the world, and most people still drink terrible coffee without giving it a second thought.
The average consumer doesn't have enough knowledge to have good taste. It's tragic. It sucks. We would have a better world if people cared just a tiny bit more about the things they consume. But they don't, because there isn't enough time and energy in their life to dedicate to truly looking into something.
And this is why I think that there will unfortunately be a demand for AI art. I don't want this to be the case. I hate it. I hope you do too. I hope we all demand higher standards from the art, culture, and goods that we consume.
But as long as people drink bad coffee, they'll read AI slop and recommend it to their friends. It's just how it is.
Here in the UK, I've recently driven a few thousand miles on longer, road trip-style holidays. That has meant more time in service stations than I'm used to, and I'm shocked (but actually not surprised) at the low bar for everything... food, drink, hygiene; all at exorbitant prices. That's before we get to the bits that really indulge our chimp-brains like the fruit machines and "special, limited edition, collaboration-with-contemporary-film milkshake/slushy/burger" that are just complete marketing exercises.
I was left wondering why people accept this? Am I just a snob, or are people legitimately fine with this? One argument is that we're all struggling — financially, emotionally, existentially — and just trying to survive and get through the day. Who cares if this coffee is £7, loaded with sugar and fat to contribute to our systemic illnesses and contains only the barest minimum of lowest-quality coffee? _"It's a hit, and it gets me through."_
And I think this answers a lot! There's a line from the last Bond film, where the evil villain utters something like "people want oblivion, they want no choices and then to die when they're not looking". It's extreme (he's a Bond-baddie after all), but I don't think it's inaccurate. We're so accustomed to everything being a bit shit that we've collectively checked out and accept it. It explains why so much that would have once been unthinkable socially/politically/morally is now just "fine". AI replacing us in the workplace but also in our hobbies is just the next in a long line of insults.
Perhaps we need to put the French in charge for a while? Nothing a good revolution couldn't fix, and at least we'll be manning the barricades with a good coffee in hand...
But the problem with this is that someone could write an agent to mimic a human. And if there is a financial incentive to prove that you're not AI, which there always will be, it is inevitable.
I've considered learning to handwrite to write my first drafts like that. But then I could use an AI to generate realistic looking scans of handwriting.
I guess I could physically mail the originals to a third party verifier. That's what it may come down to for creatives.
When I have experimented with banning these sites, I have felt a positive boost in my mental wellbeing, where I go back to being bored, which is great and leads to me doing more focused activities like reading more. I just don't know how to solve the "head in the sand" issue. This site has legitimately helped me in my career for example. I think I will land on a middle ground somewhere will be the ultimate answer, like catching up once per week or something.
Likewise with Reddit you can append .rss to get a feed
If you are only exposed to points of view that you already agree with, over time it's easy to forget that some people have other points of view (which are actually not always completely ridiculous, despite what you may have heard). Note that rage bait does not count as a divergent point of view; it's almost always a cherry-picked caricature, not anything close to a good faith representation.
This might not sound like such a big deal, but do that for billions of individuals and you have the perfect recipe for the political polarization we are currently enjoying.
The sort of national unity that we took for granted between 1945-1995 (and to some extent from 1920-1945) was explicitly manufactured by mass media. Here technology presented the same content to all people, because it was cheaper to do it that way. Before the invention of consumer radios in 1920, we had a similar political polarization as we do today, if not even moreso. Also the Federal government was significantly weaker, lacking even powers like direct taxation, let alone the mass surveillance it has now.
I'd argue it's not so much a choice by the individual in that the individual often isn't consciously aware and may actually choose to use the same thing without the algorithm that pushes them towards things such as bubbles if that were even a clearly presented option.
Calling it a dumpster fire would be an insult to dumpsters.
Sounds like a personal problem if your friends are going around causing dumpster fires.
I'm not the one bragging on social media how I don't use social media. I'm not the dense one here.
Focusing your attention on things that matter is a good skill to have. Even if you only succeed part of your time, it's better than nothing.
In some areas of life, technology and society have forced us to be more aware, of more things, more of the time. Our 'context' is filled with more things to consider, and attention is the window in. Sleep, schedule, and planning, helps to reset us and use context wisely.
Modern life forces a lot of context in, but we still have a lot of control over the rest of our daily 'attention windows' (like cutting out the excessive attention-grabbing media). It's kind of a rigid way to think, but there seems to be something there. We do have a saying afterall: 'what's on your mind?'
I appreciated the article: it was a good reminder to manage time wisely.
I thought people at work would be mad, but everybody adjusted instantly.
Next up I'd like to pre-plan blocks of focused work - an idea I got from the Deep Work book.
2. Life at the speed of play by Mark Pincus
3. The Antidote by Oliver Burkeman
4. Autobiography of a Yogi by Pramahansa Yogananda
- in bulk, it creates distorted view of reality, by overemphasizing dramatic events;
- individually, approximately half the headlines are bald-faced lies, and the other half merely click bait
- articles usually correct the lies in headlines, but in every case I could independently verify, the text was presenting heavily distorted view of the events
Some of that can be canceled out by following multiple independent sources, but frankly, doing that is IMO one of the biggest ways to waste your life I can think of. Not worth the effort. Meme sites have similar ROI, and are much more fun.
- Does this affect me in any way?
- Was this my fault?
- Can I do anything to change this?
I can't see why I should care about any event that doesn't meet a single one of these criteria, yet when I look at the front page of any news site barely any story passes this test
spreading awareness is a thing. A lot of people don't know what our politicians are doing to us which gives them even more freedom to do even worse, self-serving things.
You seem extremely active on HN, so this story sounds pretty exaggerated.
Thanks for demonstrating.
I don't think it's pedantic to have a bit of self awareness, although engaging in the discussion instead of writing a pithy one liner would be better.
I think HN is good, BTW.
And one other even more important difference is that Y Combinator does not make money from HN and so have very different incentives than Facebook.
Everyone being served the same algorithmic results is a genuine technical difference (I believe; do we actually know that HN doesn't customise the front page for logged-in users?). I think it's quite a fine distinction, though -- both sites are trying to hold the user's attention, one just omits to use an available level of customisation. I have no moral objection to either approach.
It feels very healthy how I can choose what to engage with, and what to ignore.
talking about doomscrolling and how it would be better not to do it is one of the favourite pastimes of the doomscroller. loads of fb users hate it but struggle to believe they could do without it.
I'm glad Facebook told me about my classmate Eddie's death. We would never be friends but we knew each other and my life was better for having him in a class years ago. My only other chance is hope that it is discussed at a class reunion in a few years.
However Facebook wants to give me the 'you won't believe who is harming our children' overblown scare because that is what sells. I need to cut that garbage out of my life (others have discussed why in detail). Realistically Facebook has about five minutes of useful stuff per day, which doesn't make them money. However now I'm out so they get less.
Then one day out of the blue it decided to serve me straight up white nationalist content out of the blue. It only happened for a day but the fact that it happened at all is horrifying when you think about that occurring on a global scale.
Now I only open maybe once a week for a minute to check messenger and I hope soon to be able to delete the app of my phone for good. I really worry about what we've unleashed on the world letting these billionaires capture our digital commons.
I gave up on facebook when it decided I wanted to see borderline child porn (the girl was wearing a diaper and positioned as if about to nurse from the topless mom - it might not meet the definition of child porn but it obviously trying to sit just above that line). When reported I was told the group is fine by Facebook's standards. But it isn't fine by mine.
Sadly as an indie (or frankly anyone these days?) if you don’t have a social media following, you simply don’t exist. Distribution is one of - if not the most - important things to have, so farming social media is unavoidable. The worst part is that you can’t just post and go, these apps (and respective algorithms) expect you to use them regularly for your content to be shown to people.
Automating all of that is also super tricky since there are a billion bots out there. And the alternative being pay-to-win with expensive advertising.
I've also tried to stay away from the news. I have a very long list of uBlock Origin filters [2] to hide certain words and topics on Reddit (even if its politically tangent, it gets blocked), and it works amazingly well. I hate that I have to go to such lengths to avoid the worst of the internet, but I love the freedom of mind I've gained, like really it feels liberating instead of boring.
One last thing: I've started to notice that the corporate claws are no longer in my head. On the train, I see something like 50–70% of people scrolling through algorithmically curated feeds, and I think about how much influence Zuck and company have over what so many people see and think, with almost no effort. The thing is, I feel like the "old man yells at cloud" meme, like I am the crazy person doing crazy things, but I feel better this way, so I will keep doing it.
[1]: https://blog.benjaopazoc.cl/2026/09/social-media-is-ridiculo...
[2]: https://github.com/benja-opazo/ublock-politics
We then got a bookmark system that was every bit as terrible as a web directory.
It stayed that way. The delicious search revenue made organizing websites uninteresting. That obscure website you enjoyed a decade ago but don't even remember, they had lots of traffic like you. No point updating or keeping it online. You can't have rss in Firefox but here is a Facebook like button in your address bar in stead.
I've tried to maintain the bookmark menu but I rarely use it since everything is dead. Why aren't browsers storing a text version of the bookmark? Did people in 1993 have more resources than us? Should I be afraid it grows to a few GB over the decades?
A good few dead websites have a backup some place but there is no automation to find it. If you had a string of text from a page you might be able to search for it. If the page found is highly similar we might automate the process to have alternative location for bookmarks with a nice warning dialog.
A whole different world from posts vanishing into the social media memory hole.
Instead we turned it into a worse version of television, where you still only consume passively what is fed to you while being watched and analysed.
[1] https://dev.w3.org/Amaya/amaya/AmayaPage.html
We see that over and over again, in a bunch of non-tech fields. My kids never want to clean up their toys; they will pull out new ones, but it is a struggle to get them into the habit of putting the old ones away first. My parents used to keep a notebook with every gas fill-up they made; nobody born after about 1990 does that anymore. We were taught how to balance a checkbook in elementary school; basically nobody does that anymore, we put everything on autopay and if you are diligent you check a statement or import it into Quicken once a month (most people don't even do that, they have no idea what they are spending and predictably, usually no money left over). GMail succeeded because instead of putting your mail in folders, you just leave it in one lump with Google and rely on full-text search. A lot of Zoomer computer users don't even know what files and folders are, they just use apps, which take them straight to what they want to do and don't offer things like possession of your own data.
Back in the (~early 2010s) days when Google still allowed internal innovation, there were recurrent demos produced by engineers of full-text search over your web history, though of course it was your web history as stored by Google and none of this was local. It never became a product, largely because users are too lazy to go to a separate search product just for your history, or because they're too lazy to check a separate box saying "Search my history". Instead I think web history became a ranking input to general search and it would mix in results that you frequently visited to the general results, which honestly I think was a more useful approach.
Back in the 1930s the book was probably useful because changes in mpg were a sign you needed to do a tuneup early. But back then everybody knew a tuneup was every few months and once in a while something went off in between. Cars are a lot more reliable.
2. keeping receipts ensures that if there is a problem and your engine is damaged, then you can show where you bought the fuel,oil or component and get recompense. This is rare but does happen and it can be a costly repair. Examples are:
- bad gasoline - usually debris or water. Can stop fuel flow and cost you replacement of a gas filter at the least.
- incorrect oil change - you pay for an oil change but they don't put on a new oil filter or they add the wrong kind of oil or they add too little oil or they add too much oil. Don't discount the last one: too much oil can damage the engine seriously. I once had a dealer oil change and, prior to service, explicitly warned the mechanic that the engine was a rare model and required less oil than most models: nonetheless he overfilled it. Luckily I spotted the difference immediately b/c the engine ran like shite right out of the garage. I made a freeway U-turn,drove back in, re-explained the car's needs and insisted they drain off the overfill and let me check it. The mechanic tried to cover his ass by treating it as another "crazy customer" but I just told his companions that a) he'd fucked up and b) I had specifically warned him about the problem earlier so c) they'd better keep an eye on him - he wasn't as good as they were.
3. If you sell a car, buyers love getting the records proving that you bought good oil/gas, performed maintenance, etc. FWIW most buyers do not continue to maintain such records in my experience.
I don't maintain a log book and I know only one person who does. But I file receipts for gas, parts, fluids, filters and major maintenance for each vehicle.
But it's also important to not let fanboyism cloud judgment. Tesla has great software.
2. MPG tracking by brand -- I get about 1.5 MPG better with BP.
Crazy times.
Hotmail was great 20+ years ago. Now, it's junk and I only send junk its way.
Yes, as kids probably always did since the invention of the children's room. The usual solution was to educate - and push - them until they hopefully started to understand the benefits that an orderly room can give you and maybe even had some fun thinking of a good ordering scheme by themselves.
Only in tech would the response to kids being too lazy to clean up their rooms be "oh well obviously keeping your stuff in order is an unworkable strategy".
I remember that, back when we were in school, we would actually spend a lot of time structuring the bookmark folder, making elaborate menu hierarchies. Doing this the first time was fun.
The problem was, this lasted about until the first time the PC had to be reinstalled or someone switched the browser or something else caused the bookmarks menu to be lost. Redoing all that stuff after it got wiped was much more of a chore than doing it initially.
But this would be my takeaway here: If software developers want their users to manage their own ordering schemes or use customization features, make it easy and convenient to do - and for the love of everything, threat the resulting bookmark trees, settings files etc as critical data that has to be synced, backed-up etc. If it has to be redone after a few updates or a crash, then no one will use it.
(Incidentally, tech companies have absolutely no problem "educating" their users if the behavior is something they care about. I'm pretty sure, no product or marketing person ever said "oh well, it sure would be nice if all our users made accounts or installed our app, but they're far too lazy for that, so that's a nonstarter...")
This is akin to telling parents that if they want to their children to clean their rooms, you should make it easy and convenient to do. Obviously this is non-sensical: if you make a mess it might be hard and inconvenient work. Thats why kids don't do it!
I find some tech criticisms to be simply inane; the tech companies are not going to absorb the costs of educating users or fixing unworkable strategies. Not because Bezos needs to buy another yacht, but because the companies that try to do that all die before they get big. There is a giant graveyard of startups who have tried to be the "responsible and patient parent", and they have all died. Users don't want to put up with it, and if given the option will run to the company that just handles everything for them with a subscription fee or reselling their data.
Doing exactly that, by coming in and helping them with it (initially doing most of the work) as they get into the habit if it being a regular task, actually seems to work pretty well (at least, in the n=1 experiment conducted with my son).
Not sure what the basis for “obviously non-sensical” is, other than the (very common) fetishization of struggle.
Volume makes all the difference. If you could only visit sites you bookmarked first and you had only say 200 bookmark limit, you’d keep your bookmarks in perfect order.
That’s an occupant completely ridiculous proposition in 2024; in 2027 you’ll only need to bookmark the AI chatbot services you pay for, because the rest of the internet will become completely unusable by humans.
Then you could never actually visit any sites to bookmark them in the first place, rendering maintaining your list of bookmarks a trivial exercise.
What tech companies understand well is that if a competitor takes away people's pain and you don't, people will use that competitor.
It was technically possible to copy mp3s one by one to a USB mp3 player, and many people did if they had no other options, but marking an artist in iTunes for sync was a lot easier, so consumers preferred iPods. And managing syncing and purchasing itself was a chore, which Spotify proved was entirely unnecessary to the music listening experience for most people.
Sure, there's a small but loud minority for whom the process of purchasing / organizing music itself is enjoyable, and that minority will often try to push their views on everybody else, but the majority of the population wants a "magic box" where they can type "Taylor Swift" and get Taylor Swift music to play. Or they just want "radio, but without the battery drain, commercials, useless yapping and inability to skip songs they don't like."
I only use it to bookmark it into the database so I can search it up later.
Firefox had a tool partnership with an app that did exactly this, but unfortunately it was put in the grave last year (now I know why).
Isn’t it more optimal, from the perspective of play, to have them spread out?
I can see the argument that if you clear your desk, you’ll be more inclined to draw because you have the space. But if I didn’t impose that value, they wouldn’t necessarily draw. They’d just play with something else.
I don’t track my fuel usage. I did once. Economically, I don’t need to. The car tells me my MPG anyway, literally, if I care to look.
Accounts are harder to track now, with fewer physical assets and more renting and subscriptions.
The point you make seems to be that rigidity in the system would bring value. But I think the values people have often exist outside the system. The system is imposing an idea of what is worth tracking or organising in the first place.
Oddly, I think LLMs are quite intentional in their current incarnation. You start with an empty input box, state a curiosity, and go looking for information. There’s very little imposed structure around what you should care about.
That changes once OpenAI et al. start tracking what you do and recommending what you should be looking at before you’ve even formed the intention yourself.
There are whole studies and philosophies on work/play. The one here answering your question is the 'Work Cycle' and the step 'Return Work'.
Haha, mine too! I guess it was to calculate the fuel efficiency, which is often done automatically now.
Now I have LLMs build me tiny apps that let me upload docs and images with local processing and human verification.
My OCD is finally satiated
The real world solves it too btw. in the same way a relational database did: Indexes ;) Tagging is nothing but different indexes of the same underlying thing. Be it a book or an email or whatever else.
And this top level comment is actually weird to me. Maybe I'm just a non-Chrome-user? I use Firefox. I never bookmark anything any longer. I literally just know what to type to get to what I need to from the history. Like HN. I literally just type n into a new tab and HN is the first suggestion based on how often/recently I went here. No manual bookmarking or anything non-local needed.
Similarly at work I just know how to find certain things by typing into the search bar. And it even learns from recency. Our app URLs recently changed and I had to start typing the new unique parts of the URL recently for a few tries until it went up in the recency bias calculation. Sure like I had to scroll down a few entries in the history search a few times. Now I just know what to type to get where I want to again.
I see others struggle with rigid bookmark structures that they can't find anything in like ever on the regular though (URL change or not) :( And (at least with firefox) those bookmarks would even get searched too! Of course, unlike history they would have to manually update bookmarks. I really don't get it how people even still use bookmarks any longer.
I like the concept of indices but a lot of indices i see (like in textbooks) are incomplete. I have to think "ok what might be related to this?" And it certainly is not an easy problem!
Bookmarks are folder structure. Theoretically you can bookmark the same thing under a different part of the structure of course. I've never really seen people do that though, except accidentally because they found something the liked, bookmarked it in on place, later found it again, didn't remember they already bookmarked it and bookmarked it in a different part of their folder structure. In a way they also "tagged" except that the actual bookmark, the thing is not the same. It's a copy. If your bookmark goes to some address that might change while pointing to the same actual thing, you'd now have to update (and first find) a multitude of bookmarks in your folder structure.
The tech was cool, but I think they ran into the issue you just suggested - people dont really bookmark, and it was hard to make people see it as anything other than a bookmarking tool with categorization.
I need to find the LLM tool that "cleans my room" for me by rearranging my 20+ year old dir layout that just keeps growing.
However we've now got local AI to do it for us:
https://github.com/corv89/rookmark
Yes, and that's IMO perfectly understandable. What was that greeting card text? "A clean apartment is a sign of a wasted life."
Not from the US, we didn't have "balancing the checkbook" over here, but watching my parents and grandparents, and trying to mimic them growing up, I have a distinct impression that all that bookkeeping - from budgeting to gas refills to blood pressure measuerments (which my grandfather did diligently in his final decade of life) - was done as much of immediate necessity as it was of habit.
People did their book-keeping by hand because there was no external authoritative source to track it for them, but also because they needed to know - there were consequences for not knowing some numbers or their history on-demand. As soon as either becomes false, people stop. Very few people I know "keep books" for their individual spending - and it's not because auto-pay, it's because the bank gives you that information for free, effortlessly, in near real-time. The bank is now the authoritative source of how much money you have.
(That's the "external authoritative source". Auto-pay is a masssive QoL improver, but it's a consequence, not cause. The cause here is achieving "not really needing to know" by keeping your earnings higher than spendings. Then you literally don't need to care about money day-to-day, and only check balance when you're planning larger purchases - and then manually paying bills is basically "sign of a wasted life".)
> A lot of Zoomer computer users don't even know what files and folders are, they just use apps, which take them straight to what they want to do and don't offer things like possession of your own data.
That's a problem - but zooming out a bit, back to "bookmarks", the problem is that sometimes you need to do some book-keeping yourself - you may have your own reasons to need to know, and there is no authority other than you. Unfortunately, it turns out, modern software is then useless, because it doesn't stop at not requiring users to keep things tidy - they purposefully don't ship the necessary tools and affordances to keep things tidy.
In either cases while you can reify your organizational system into files and folders it's just inferior to a personal classification system.
> Music ks a good example. Most people want to organize by album, artist, year, genre, or song title.
I assumed this is because that's what software is limited to, and people cope, and the only people who really organize like that were the record stores owners. Because personally, this in no way even resembling how I think of my music collection, or how I pick what to listen to.
For me it's usually by theme, personal "feels like they belong together" connection, causal relationships (e.g. music from the same trip I went to in high school), or artist but defined loosely, I.e. tolerant of the fact that artists collaborate and perform together.
> I like to order my photos by outing or by subject.
Outing, yes, but by-subject is alien to me. Most of my photos have exactly zero people, or anywhere from 2 to 20+. Single subject photos are oddity, and I rarely feel the need to organize by them. Events, then by date, then maybe by location.
In both cases search turns out to be the answer, but with photos it's phenomenally unreliable due to vendor fucking with or stripping metadata.
For Office-style documents, there's no better way (except for search and recents), because everybody has different needs and deals with very different kinds of documents. For things that are more standardized, like music or photos, people want to think in terms of artists, albums and playlists, not in terms of some meticulously-maintained folder hierarchy.
Folders have some nifty properties, like good deletion handling, permissions management and intuitive movement from and to different drives, but they don't outweigh the advantage of specialized entities for most people.
Most people don't have a problem with files. You learn what a file is in your first computer class day and you're done with it.
Files are not just about organization, primarily, they are the fundamental unit of information. They decouple data storage from processing, transformation, and transfer. It's how we give physicality to information. They give the user freedom in multiple ways:
- Freedom to open the file with whatever program I want, allowing me to experience it however (with a player), but also to create derivative works (in an editor).
- Freedom to store the file wherever I want, both locally or remotely.
- Freedom to share the files with others, via whatever mechanism I want.
Without files, computing is just about individual consumption. You don't own anything. That song you bought? You don't own it, it's some kind of abstract entity in Apple Music. The only thing you can do with it is press play. Living in an OS without files is like living in an universe where everything is liquid and containers of any kind are forbidden, all you can do is open the tap and drink straight from the stream.
Even if you create something? It's locked in some kind of vacuum that Apple controls. Wanna back it up? Pay Apple for Apple cloud. Wanna share it with someone? Figure it out, probably step one is to ask them to buy an Apple device.
I laugh whenever people say that Apple is "easier". The contortions I've seen people do just to get stuff from one device to another even within their own ecosystem.
The tragedy of all of this is that people that live in mobile are becoming less capable with technology over time. People talk of "the digital native" generation but kids these days know way less capable with machines than their parents. It used to be that everyone and their cousin knew how to use a P2P program, to burn a CD, to use external drives. Now you ask someone to send you some trip pictures and they'll just WhatsApp them to you. If you ask them to send you the high res originals they look at you with amazement: files? formats? compression? what's that???
Spotlight tried but didn't seem to get very far, and after the mobile revolution, nobody else could due to all the sandboxing.
I guess the fact that it's very easy to search the open web (and very hard to search things behind login walls efficiently) is also a partial cause.
Pairs up with my EU and Revolut bank perfectly, auto imports transactions, most of which you can set rules that auto assign to categories. And as they said 90% is automated, I just categorize a few transactions a week manually.
I tried something like envelope budgeting before in excel but didn't work really since I was lazy to manually add transactions, this is much easier. Budegting for a house and a USA trip without worries now :)
The system isn't perfect but, in my experience, it works 90% of the time. The remaining 10% requires manual categorisation. I suppose it also depends on how simple or complex your budget and your spending are.
Am I going to scroll through and find it later? Barely functions with text search due to only minimal metadata (maybe a title).
Worse still, I used to use bookmarks for things I wanted to return to, but now they're all dead links pretty much.. so now I have to go through and get disappointed because something interesting has now gone.
Total waste of time.
- a flat list of items, then you want - folders (or categories), beyond that you want - tag clouds, beyond those you want - keyword and strong search, beyond that you want - natural language queries.
Or any combination of those.
(There are more ways to organize/sort but I either don't know where to put them or they serve a specific type of data. I like the file system representation where each file and folder is a box the size of its size.)
Doing some of it by hand allows a workshop with more tools while preserving sanity.
The actual goal is actually really simple. There clearly is an agenda to get rid of any and all user generated media asap. Anything that works in the opposite direction will help reclaim the users executive function.
When creating a software or other products I always jokingly ask myself what kind of people I want to target and what I want to make them into. The joke is the limited room.
Building your own library should obviously be more awesome than borrowing. It might take the user a decade to see it but when they are old those child hood activities are a joy to be reminded of.
I relied on that a lot until one day a random system update deleted all my old browsing history.
The earlier CERN, later W3C, LineMode browser, named "www", also kept a full text history by default
Each website gets a separate folder, e.g., "308" in the example below
An .index file contains a log of all requested URLs with timestamps
Pages are cached in temp files, e.g., HTTP response headers are stored in .meta files The "www" browser still compiles without errors today along with an assortment of other utilties. I use these with a TLS forward proxyI use the W3C programs to retrieve HTML but not to view it. For reading HTML I use a contemporary text-only browser
"www" is a 671.0K static binary for me
I'm a text-only browser user for 30+ years so I'm probably biased in favor of text. I routinely save HTML pages from webites I find useful, almost always as plain text. No resources. This makes sesnse for me because plain text is how I search and consume information. Firefox and other popular browsers generally do not save pages as plain text, they have always attempted to save as HTML along with page resources. But I'm not interested in images, fonts, CSS, Javascript, etc. Today I notice some people writing headlless browsers, like h5i, now output pages as markdown or some "machine-readable" format
*websites
For example,
Neither Firefox or Vivaldi on Android has an option to save pages, only to print them to PDF
Saving can be achieved in these graphical browsers, e.g., through intents ("share"), but this requires other apps
I do get that for some people it's about research and collecting documents. For me it's basically "quick access to the most recent version of the thing at this URL"
I'm always fascinated when people claim YouTube pushes content like this. It's an extremely common take, but I don't think it's true.
My experience has been that if I stop clicking something, the algorithm soon stops recommending it. It occasionally brings back a blast from the past--e.g. I watched a sumo competition once, and once in a blue moon it recommends another. But you can downvote bad recommendations, and I simply don't get recommendations for ideas I've never engaged with before.
FWIW I'm not saying the algorithm is great. My feed is absolutely worthless right now, but it's all goofy Japanese content because one of my kids is extremely into that right now. There's zero political content because she isn't showing any interest in it. Heck, most of the stuff isn't even in English anymore.
It's honestly very refreshing to have stuff I self-host and be operational without needing 24/7 Internet connection.
I'm running such a setup since years and, IMO, it helps me focus.
I remember thinking about how different that workflow is but it must be incredibly productive. Everything would be lightning fast (even stable Internet isn't always snappy and sometimes it's a chore) and there would basically be zero inline ads or any context switches.
> "I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it."
[Pre-Chorus] "We're not going to make it," he explained how the end will come "You and me were never meant to be part of the future"
[Chorus] All we have is now All we've ever had is now All we have is now All we'll ever have is now
[Verse 2] I noticed that he had a watch and hat that looked familiar He was me, from a dimension torn free of the future
[Pre-Chorus] "We're not going to make it," he explained how the end will come "You and me were never meant to be part of the future"
[Chorus] All we have is now All we've ever had is now All we have is now All we'll ever have is now
Flaming Lips - All We Have Is Now
now that we have cheap spam filtering, why don't we go back to forums
Spam was just a very small part of why people left forums. Size of the community and network effects was one of them. A constant stream of activity on any subject you wanted was yet another. Not having to log in to 40 different places yet another.
The browser extension LinkOff makes the feed much more bearable, even useful. [1]
Also, though I dislike the posts that LI pushes into my feed, I've never gotten the sense that this was motivated by a desire to boost Microsoft's investments. Perhaps I just wasn't paying attention, or am not cynical enough?
1: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/linkoff-filter-and-...
* adblocking is simple both in browser and on the dns level,
* revanced youtube allows you to even skip sponsored segments, regular ads don't deserve a mention, you will see none,
* reddit hasn't been good in forever, it's why we're here,
somehow Twitter/Spotify/YouTube/TikTok algos work just fine for me with this one simple trick: I watch the good stuff, and skip/block/mute the not-so-good stuff. This works less well on LinkedIn but it's a Microsoft product, what did you expect, really.
If you're like me, ie. on Hacker News daily, the modern Internet is a never ending series of wonders with virtually none of the inconvenience. And if on some absolute edge, you must use a website that sucks, both Claude and ChatGPT can drive a browser nowadays.
For consumer digital products, the only business model that seems to work is advertising, because consumers are cheap and refuse to pay money for software. But the result is that they instead trade something far more valuable for the software, which is their attention.
The products that get built, as a result, are supremely well-engineered to attract and retain attention, to the detriment of their users. Most of the "news" that reaches us these days is not at all an attempt to actually educate us about the state of the world. Instead its just a collection of inflammatory and enraging facts that are chosen to optimize for engagement (to hold your attention)
In theory, someone could rebuild an ecosystem where people stopped squandering their attention and monetized it with money, but this would require consumers to stop chronically undervaluing their time and overvaluing their money.
Which is kind of scary where you realise people spend hours and hours each day watching youtube slop, tiktok, instagram reels, while also subconsciously feeling "this content is worthless and I wouldn't pay $10 a month to keep watching it".