CommenterPerson

"You're censoring our billionaires' freedom to addict your people, psychologically damage your children, promote climate skepticism, spread lies, motivate people to lynch others"

Serious violation!

He did acknowledge he posted something similar elsewhere a few months ago. I found his comment useful.

I have been thinking of upgrading from my 2003 Corolla to an electric (not Tesla). The Corolla hasn't had a single repair problem in 23 years!

My main motivation to get a better car was, DD goes to a super prestigious college and it seems degrading to put their bumper sticker on a 23 year old car! But I guess I won't get another car. Serves you right mfr mfrs!

I share some genes with some squirrels and your grandfather.

I have two boxes for cables and power supplies. We have a couple of rental properties. In the garage I have boxes for plumbing parts, electrical parts, one for brackets, one with all kinds of fasteners, one for special tools. These are just small size moving type cardboard boxes, all on storage shelf. My helper laughs at why I keep all the junk, but he's the first to rummage through them when we need something. Everything somewhat organized enough that there's room to park the cars inside the garage.

My microwave oven, washer, dryer all have wifi, so I could supposedly interact with them via "apps". Nooooooo. I wish I could find the chip involved and "Muntz" it.

I think the OP means they're NPC in your game or everyone elses game. They don't care to participate in your meaningless rat race.

They're playing their own game, whatever has meaning to them.

Here are some things I try:

Turn off Notifications.

Turn off location services except when navigating or calling the taxi.

Uninstall as many apps as possible, use browser.

Use adblocking anti tracking browser (I use Duck, alt suggestions welcome).

Report unknown / unwanted senders as spam.

That said, I am a NEWS ADDICT. There are four world leaders whose downfall I eagerly await, and frequently check the news for this ;-) .. you might be able to guess three but not the fourth.

Sadly, one of the contributors to this are the "Little" Tech Bros. They have drunk the kool aid at work. A bit libertarian or right wing in nature, they salivate at the latest Full Self Driving (supervised) lie, or AI hype, or crypto when it first came out. Some intricate new feature or language puts them into paroxysms of joy. In their view, any attempt to regulate or draw boundaries around "tech" equates to communism, marxism, and attempts to curtail so called freedom of speech. Don't use it if you don't like it, they say.

By Little Tech Bros i mean developers with lots of technical skills, but who haven't been lucky enough to be in the right spot at the right time with an IPO. They keep evangelizing hoping megabucks lightning will hit them the next time. It won't. More likely, a layoff notice. Because Big Tech Bro figured out how to grab all the money from their excess productivity.

Apple = Landlord

You = Tenant

Stay poor, or just buy a basic phone, uninstall useless attention economy apps and live better.

I wish the entire web was in this format. Really. May need a bit of work to navigate around but very fast, no BS, no tracking.

I get all my news by reading: NYT, WSJ, BBC, AP, and a few Substacks.

NYT has gotten so bloated both in actual content (long meandering interviews) as well as the encapsulating junk. I started to put it into Gemini to summarize. During this process I found, the two hour interview transcript was 50% actual words and 50% junk (probably formatting, tracking, adware, surveillance?).

The junk made me feel dirty.

Great concepts, very well written, Kudos to the writer! I bookmarked your main site.

Also : as usual, lots of HN type nitpicking in the comments, most missing the main story.

I'm an existence proof of this. I learned SQL following my previous employer dying a slow death > layoffs. Having worked in a narrow field, there weren't options to continue working in it. That was 25 years ago.

SQL was the foundation of a second career in business data analytics. Moderately interesting and paid the bills.

I must say, it's not just select *, joins and so forth. The human side was important. Always being on the lookout in Big Corp for people hungry for data (lots of them), and working to find quick solutions.