scruple

I'm not disparaging you, it's neat that you built this and it clearly solves a problem for people. But IMO, leveraging behavioral friction is simpler than dealing with all of this administrative overhead.

I treat my phone as stateless by default. I don't keep many non-stock apps installed. The obvious exceptions are authenticators, I hate it but I get it, and I need my banking app. Pretty much everything else is ephemeral and disposable to me. If I genuinely need an app, I install it, use it, and wipe it.

The imposed friction here kills the compulsory behavior. Do I really want to see what's on Instagram? No, I really don't. Do I really want to spend $7 for a mediocre latte at Starbucks? No, not really. This unintended side-effect has been great. I have no tolerance now for modern retail coercion, and opting out of the enshittified layer of everything has been great for my wallet and my sanity.

For personal correspondence? Yes. Most of what email was used for, for actual humans in their personal lives, has transitioned to SMS and other apps like WhatsApp, WeeChat, Signal, Discord, and that happened a decade ago.

You see that 90% of the daily volume is sludge and think this is a healthy communication network for humans?

Out of roughly 400 billion emails sent daily worldwide, estimates pin actual human written messages at around 10%. In personal inboxes, human correspondence is essentially extinct. Checking my own personal email inbox right now, the entire first page is 2FA, Amazon, some shit from my climbing gym, my car, my employer health insurance, my bank... My spam filters are aggressive and there are literally thousands of unread emails in there waiting for me to click select all -> delete. Even at work the overwhelming majority is automated Jira noise, CI/CD noise, calendar shit, compliance blasts... I have received maybe 2 or 3 actual human typed messages in the last 2-3 weeks.

It's a fucking log dump for machines.

Cash is fungible. Living somewhere isn't. Debt is not liquidity, it's encumbrance. It carries strings and fees, in this case foreclosure risk. You're ignoring the entire human reality of housing.

It hasn't exactly worked out well for email, either...

And the actual margins are about 3%. No one in gaming makes the sorts of margins that Satya is demanding Xbox makes. It's pretty clear to see where this goes. I'm also not sure that the unionization pushes in their studios isn't the real story.

Certainly you realize there's more options.

My gripe is the article is acting like there's some great cultural mystery here. Suggesting anxiety and rideshares and screen time are "the problem." What about the basic arithmetic?

Outside of a handful of legacy pre-war metros / urban cores, North American development has continued to double down on the automobile. While at the same time, the costs to carry a car have exploded.

Young people today are being stranded in an environment that physically requires an automobile while also economically locking them out of even owning one.

I have a prominent scar on my cheek. It's from Mohs surgery. People in my personal life know I'm a combat veteran and used to train BJJ and MMA, so it's always assumed that this scar has some drama associated to it. Even people who knew me before I had Mohs surgery tend to forget. When people ask I play it up a bit but then I let them down with the truth.

Or, the AI convincingly responds that it "understands."

Automated proofs do sound very neat but I think they'll be constrained to a vanishingly small set of already paranoid domains like cryptography, aerospace, etc. Everywhere else is going to spend the dividends on shipping more unvetted code faster, we're just trading discipline for velocity.

The author did.

Bouncing an idea off an LLM, or an editor, or a friend, to check for plausibility isn't composition. It's no different than rubber ducking. The human still did the work.

Generating ideas or checking edge cases isn't the threshold. The threshold is delegation of the craft itself. Who is actually wrestling the thoughts into language, making the hard calls and owning the consequences of the narrative? If the human is still selecting, structuring, and writing the prose then the investment is real. If they hit a button and let the model generate the chapters resolving X, Y, and Z, they abdicated.