floundy

Sorry, worded poorly, yes I feel Macs are less “dumbed down” in the sense that user experience and design aren’t sacrificed to try and make it easier for the lowest common denominator to use, but in the end it’s just worse for everybody. Example: in Windows 11 the right click menu has less options than Win10, and now contains a “more” option leading to expanding another submenu where pretty basic functions from Win10 right click are hidden behind this extra menu. Hell, the design doesn’t even match. The nested context menu looks like it was Frankensteined in from Win10. Apple at least has a design philosophy for UI stuff.

I have personally felt like I have to fight less with MacOS than I did with Windows. And my pihole shows Apple isn’t greedily trying to hoover up my data like MS.

Yup that’s why I started self-hosting, when my wife got pregnant and we started to think about what technology access for our future kids would look like.

I started with CasaOS and Jellyfin. Quickly outgrew Casa and moved to learning Docker and setting up my own container stack, moving from media self-hosting to adding new containers of stuff like budgeting apps. I’m still working on building out my server but every container I add, the goal is basically to self-host a version of something I’m doing on a centralized service on the web and ultimately take my data and privacy back.

I will say some peoples’ elitist attitudes about stuff can be annoying and discouraging; it’s the same general spillover attitude from the Linux supremacy crowd. When I started with Casa I had someone basically tell me I was wasting my time and if I wasn’t running everything in VMs why bother. Which is entirely the opposite attitude to get “normies” and low technical literacy people on board, they need easy one-click install solutions like CasaOS. And if they decide to move onto something more complex, well I’m sure they can figure out how to reimage and rebuild their server in ProxMox or Docker as part of that.

Wasn’t BlueSky kinda ruined by the whole leftist Twitter exodus while simultaneously being fawned over and settled by Reddity political types? Maybe I’m missing something but I’ve tried to use it a few times and it just feels like another internet echo chamber silo (even if that’s due to user self-isolation and not the underlying tech).

I’m not going crazy, right, nearly nobody aside from professional writers used em dashes prior to 2022. And the whole bolded topic intro, colon, short 1-2 sentence explanation seems way more like a product of GPT formatting than how organic humans would structure it?

So much writing on the internet seems derivative nowadays (because it is, thanks to AI). I’d rather not read it though, it’s boring and feels like a samey waste of time. I do question how much of this is a feedback loop from people reading LLM text all the time, and subconsciously copying the structure and formatting in their own writing, but that’s probably way too optimistic.

My self-hosted Linux server increasingly feels like the only real computer I own.

I did within the last year switch from Windows to Mac for my primary desktop, and it feels like I regressed about a decade in the dumbification of computing compared to where Windows was headed.

This is hilarious projection of your preferences and market predictions onto every other consumer.

I bought a 2024 Toyota hybrid. I don’t care about electric vehicles and won’t bother reinvestigating them until 2034 at the earliest. I don’t see the problems with electric vehicles being solved anytime soon in the US.

So the way I understand Tailscale is that it's built on top of Wireguard; Tailscale claims it's "easier to use" but I haven't found Wireguard to be difficult to configure at all. Are there any extra benefits to using Tailscale that I'm overlooking?

I definitely don't open a bunch of ports to the internet! I use Wireguard to VPN back into my home network from my mobile devices. Wireguard only responds to packets that contain a valid preconfigured crypto key, so while the WG port is technically "open" it doesn't respond to a port scanner.

You're speaking of some idealized moderation system where tone and politeness is enforced, and human corruptibility does not entice moderators into censoring speech they disagree with? Yeah sure, I'd love to be there. It's just a rare thing to find on the modern web, and it's not guaranteed to last for any length of time.

The modern web example of your bar scenario is more like this: the bartender doesn't want to hear [opposing political/societal issue opinion] at the bar and starts kicking out everyone he disagrees with. The kicked out people go start their own bar. Now there's two neighboring bars, MAGABar and LibBar; customers are automatically filtered into attending either bar by an algorithm. If you say anything that the bartender disagrees with, you're permanently banned. The fun part is that you can be permanently banned from BOTH bars if your viewpoints don't fall in line 100% with what the bartender wants to hear.

Oh and you can't go to TechBar anymore either, the bartender heard you said something critical of furries at another bar, so now you're banned and not allowed to talk about computers.

Perhaps there's simply no middle ground between something like Voat which turned into a gathering place of bonafide racists, and something like Reddit which is essentially just a confirmation bias hugbox. If there is, it's certainly not a profitable product.

How is this a "gotcha" when I'm on the internet I'm being forced to use? I pick the most agreeable platforms. I like that HN filters out politics, sports, and celebrities, it's more like a themed forum than an open board. HN doesn't deem these topics as "problematic", simply as off-topic.

Anyway my point was "problematic content" is often used as a buzzword by censorship happy people, and ends up being synonymous with "something I disagree with." We have just literally seen the real life consequences of pushing for censorship — that it will eventually be used against speech that one agrees with — and nobody quite seems to care.

I'm working on De-Googling. I now have a Mac and an iPhone instead of Windows/Android, but switching from Drive to iCloud seems a fairly parallel move.

I also set up my first home server with RAID NAS. It's on my list to spin up an OpenOffice container or something I can use to replace Google Sheets. That will let me delete my Drive data; next is Google Photos and eventually Gmail.

Turns out that echo chambers with manufactured consensus are quite profitable.

Actually, no, reasonable people do not want either platforms or governments to moderate content.

Who defines what "problematic content" is?

The tech companies have wised up and they'll continue to speak idyllically about what "should be" and maybe even deploy watered-down versions of it, but really they're just buying time to where they can get even bigger and capture more power before the government even thinks of stepping in. The nice thing about being first to market is you can abuse the market, abuse customers, pay a few trivial class action lawsuits along the way, then when regulations finally lag along you've got hundreds of billions worth of market power behind you to bribe the politicians. The US govt won't do anything about AI companies for at least 5 years, and when they do OpenAI, Google, and Meta will all be sitting at the table holding the pen.

That's hilarious given that Reddit is utterly overrun with blatant, low-quality LLM accounts using ChatGPT to post comments and gain karma, and several of the "text stories" on the front page from subs like AITA are blatant AI slop that the users (or other bots?) are eating up.

I suspect sites like Reddit don't care about a few% false positive rate, without considering in context that bot farmers literally do not care, they'll make another free account, but genuine users will have their attitude towards the site turn significantly negative when they're falsely actioned.

Don't worry, Reddit's day of reckoning comes when the advertisers figure out what percent of Reddit's traffic that they're paying to serve ads to are just bots.

It can't be mere coincidence that there's a significant overlap between crypto bros and AI boosters in my social circles.

The conclusion of "declining middle class" doesn't follow from the article. Disney theme parks can only admit so many people per day (scarcity) and for Disney fans there's no real replacement Mecca (inelasticity). This is simple supply and demand. It's not a market failure, because nobody is missing out on anything by not going to Disney.

Since these E-Ink phones all suck in specific ways or have uncertain compatibility with US cell carriers I carry 2 devices, my Android smartphone (which I've dumbed down in a similar way to you) and a Boox Palma 2 (which I use for reading articles and books).

I pretty much use my Android in grayscale only for texting/2FA, phone calls, and occasionally email. I entirely disabled the web browser. If a restaurant has QR code menus I don't care anymore, I'll just leave. If I'm "bored" I'll pull out my Palma and get some reading in.

Typing on the Palma's screen sucks due to the input delay. At least if you have fat fingers like me and prone to making typos on touchscreen devices.

Typing on the Palma with a BT keyboard, however, is an absolute joy.

Even your comment reads like GPT. What's that weird delta character, something you copy/pasted from GPT that didn't render on HN?

As an (actual) author, I don't want to read AI output. I don't want to read AI output that was edited by a human. This stuff is boring, syntactically predictable, and it's definitely not art.

>You have been blocked from The New York Times because we suspect that you're a robot.

Thanks, AI.

"Normal" users lose yet again. I have 2 tabs open. When I'm done writing this comment, I'll close one of them.

I installed KOReader following these instructions: https://github.com/koreader/koreader/wiki/Installation-on-Ko...

Wallabag plugin is built into KOReader. Launch KOReader by clicking the icon it puts in your Kobo library, then in the menus you will find Wallabag config. I added a "Wallabag Articles" folder for it to sync to.

Note if you use a password manager, my password had a double quote which I believe messed with the .lua config password string, so I was getting connection errors.

It took 80-90 mins to download 1200 unread articles to my Kobo. I haven't played with the auto sync function yet, so far I just manual sync before/after a reading session.

I switched to Wallabag. 14 day free trial (an actual free trial that doesn't require CC info). There's a Pocket import function. I found it useful to filter the .csv that Pocket downloaded me into two .csv's, one for unread articles and one for archived articles, that I respectively imported into Wallabag as the import feature allowed for "mark as read" on imports.

About 10% of the articles I had didn't download due to Captcha requirements or paywalls that had been added since I had archived the article in Pocket. Once my articles imported to Wallabag, I filtered the unread list from 0 to 3 minutes which showed me all the ones that were paywalled or only saved snippets. I fixed them with the Wallabag browser extension, which has an option to save content direct from browser.

I now have Wallabag on my Android phone, Boox ereader (runs Android), and Kobo ereader (via KOReader). No issues and I'm liking it better than Pocket.

>like Reddit which no longer allows anonymous access to NSFW subreddits in the UK

I haven't heard of this. Is Reddit enforcing ID verification or are you meaning UK residents simply need to be logged into Reddit to access this content?

>Is there anything we can do to combat this and hold out the open internet a little longer?

The internet is on its deathbed anyway. Generative AI is administering the fatal injection. This experiment has nearly reached its conclusion.

>Whether it was written by Shakespeare himself or AI, is irrelevant

I couldn't disagree more, the products of AI lack all value of the original works, namely that it was created through the mental effort of a real human, is known to this day due to being impactful or influential in some way, and that the output of the originals is limited in scope to what the author produced during their lifetime (scarcity).

>On the subject of scientific advancement, there are surely mountains of discoveries just waiting for us in the data we've already collected, but as humans we're not capable of fully recognizing Long difficult patterns, especially when there are many variables involved. However, AI is getting very good at that.

This is doing nothing other than adding a chatbot GUI to existing statistical software analysis tools. It might make it "easier to use" but lowering the bar to entry, will (IMO) allow people who lack the skills to verify the AI's claims and hypotheses to proliferate. At some point in the future after deployment of this, the humans' skills at verifying and validating will atrophy and the AI will be leaned on more heavily, when at the end of the day it's really just code. We're already seeing this with the kids that just graduated college, they had ChatGPT since their sophomore year. Most of them can't write, can't reason, can't code, can't do anything without their little AI.

I'm hearing kids in interviews respond with "I'd ask AI to do it." I ask them, "the AI says it's not familiar with what you're asking, what would you do then, describe the process for approaching the problem." Most of them can't. Young engineers are being completely stumped when I ask them about verification and validation of what the AI has produced.

I had a (definitely non-billionaire) coworker crowing to me about the scientific discoveries AI was going to make the other day. I was poking him about how that would happen, how the AI could do anything other than recite and recombine based on tokenized probability of what it had ingested, and he kept using words like "think" to refer to the AI.

Then he's going on about how "AI can write anything you want, in the style of any author that's ever existed" so I asked him "what value is added to the world by having text that looks like it might have been written by Shakespeare but really wasn't" and he didn't have an answer.

Blind worship of AI is rapidly becoming one of my biggest tells of low cognition humans. I'm just so tired of hearing about AI and I'm ready to move onto the next "big thing".

We might be able to get you up to a whole dollar, just listing off the various chat/messaging apps Google has killed off over the years. I take it as an opportunity to move to FOSS/self-hosted substitutes when that happens.

Not for ARM.