> This is probably the most difficult part. I had to remove all social media and streaming apps from my iPhone. I removed Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, etc. When I started, I found myself picking up the phone and immediately noticing that something was missing, since the only things left to do were check the weather, read boring emails, or see my bank account.
These past few months, I have more resolve than ever to cut the chains. Willpower is a practice, and there have been successful steps towards the goal.
First, blocking the real sucks (X, Reddit). Then news (Canadian, won't bore you with the list). And then an innocuous yet sticky set of apps that I would bounce to often, for little benefit or reason: weather, server stats, stocks. A new wrinkle? Inane conversations with LLMs. Blocked!
HN still because, well brothers and the rare sister, it's lonely out there and this place cracks me up. And not much longer.
Now on to entire devices. Desktop, laptop, destined for a locked-down iPad. Lobotomized iPhone, got a watch, and now, slowly, more and more reading.
What pushed me over the edge is the realization that I'm in grief. The Internet which once shaped my identity today, in no defensible way, resembles the silly place which once gave me solace. And yet, like a husk I cling to the teet of these manipulative networks and websites hoping for one last, satisfying drink.
I very much connect with the "I'm in grief but desperately trying to hold onto something long dead". People point to the smolweb (ugh, that term), Gemini, or something else as proof it's still there, but it really isn't. I'm glad they exist, but the mindshare is with the addictive, algorithm-driven destinations. It's like listening to your favourite band play to a handful of people in the room next to a Taylor Swift concert, you might not like Taylor Swift, but the crowds and energy are all over there, and it's hard to hear your own music when something else is blaring through the wall.
My own response has been to opt out at the hardware level: I've gone for a Mudita Kompakt e-ink phone. I haven't even bothered installing social media, the experience would be bad enough that I'd never be tempted, but what it's great for is KOReader and some light fiction. I use my Kindle for heavier fiction and non-fiction, and paper when I suspect I'll really want to engage with a book, writing all over it, referencing it heavily.
An easy trick nowadays is to simply log out of the accounts. Most social media websites really want you to log in so they become unusable when you log out. Its a good defense in depth strategy.
You’ll have to login each time you’ll want to access it.
If you have a password manager that allows you to login faster, just modify your password in a known way like {password_stored_in_passmanager}_IACKNOWLEDEGEIREALLYWANTTOLOGIN
If you want to keep the account but lose the access for a long time, just remove the password from your password manager, next time you’ll want to login you’ll have to use the password recovery.
>What pushed me over the edge is the realization that I'm in grief. The Internet which once shaped my identity today, in no defensible way, resembles the silly place which once gave me solace.
ooof. I'm 56. I got an Internet email address before most people knew email existed (1987). I belonged to virtual communities on usenet and listservs well before the web as we know it took root.
For me, as an avid reader of non-fiction books, for learning, i'm starting to question the value of reading them, compared to a good in-depth discussion with an LLM about a subject, together with reading academic papers and long articles/blog posts.
I understand what you mean but there is a depth of thought that is hard to capture outside a book.
The main problem is that so many books are really just essays or papers that get stretched to 300 pages because that is what the publisher wants. A great book I don't think has this problem.
I don't see a separation though between books, LLMs, papers and audiobooks. I would add youtube lectures in there too. They are all valued friends in learning to me.
Because using the other methods of learning, possible coupled with having a search environment inside the chat for the future, or creating memorization material for the stuff i specifically want to memorize - seems more efficient and effective.
Two things here. First, you have to know what to ask an LLM. A book on a subject is already organized with all the information that could be returned by the same prompts that would lead to it. The prompting effort was essentially already done by the author and publisher.
Second, you’re getting a more compressed and lossy form of that information from an LLM, unless you go to such efforts that it’s be easier to just read the book. It’s akin to a conversation where a friend asks you about a book in finer and finer detail until you either recite the book for them word for word or direct them to just go read the book.
So, I don’t think LLMs are replacements for reading books. They’re complimentary.
I loved the article, but the only part that I didn't connect with was the blocking, and probably the goals (not sure if going for the numbers instead of the pleasure of reading something good is ideal long term). I think the author and you shouldn't necessarily be so hard on yourselves to go to these extremes of blocking of these things, usually it works for a while, but it might come back worse when you crack and try it again.
I found myself in a similar situation last year, I felt like I have no time, but I was just scrolling mindlessly on social media whenever there was some off time. As I was reading quite a lot when I was younger, I ended up maybe reading 1-2 books a year, best case scenario. Last summer somehow I wanted to try something else that would help me keep focus or disconnect, maybe for me it worked because of what I started reading. I heard 2-3 years ago on a podcast (Tim Ferris I think) about Ted Chiang and bought one of his collections, but never read it. I got so fascinated with the first book (sort stories, you could just read a story on the go, no huge time investment) and the stories that I ended up reading most all his works, that just hooked me up. A year later, I'm around 2-3 books per month, always try to alternate from fiction to non-fiction, try to mix up and probably the most important part, like in the post, whenever I feel like I don't "vibe" with the book or author, I just stop. Forcing yourself to read a book that you don't like is probably the easiest way of breaking the habit. I even stopped driving to work, the 40 minutes I get per day to read on the train are amazing, it makes me happy if there is some technical issue and the train takes 10-20 minutes longer, more time to read.
> but the only part that I didn't connect with was the blocking, and probably the goals.
Funny, because I found the post terrible but approve of the goals technique if done temporarily. Many many years ago I set myself a reading goal (first year it was number of books; second year and beyond it was time spent reading) and that served me well to both establish the types of books which aren’t worth it and create the reading mindset. Now I read whenever, but it has become frequent and effortless.
Some of the things I found terrible advice in the post include:
> Also, Ryan Holiday — a famous author
Look, you do you, but Ryan Holiday is not a good person to take advice from. Also, being a “famous author” is not a credential for being the person to help you read more, especially if you are familiar with his history.
> Avoid summaries and summary services. (…) reading a summary does not equal reading a book.
Many many books are not worth the amount of pages they take. This includes several books popular on HN. Too many books should have been pamphlets. They take one big core idea then stretch it out over multiple chapters with self-serving examples, story after story of repeating the same bullshit. Not every book is read for pleasure, some are only worth it for the information. Find a talk on YouTube that the author has given, and you’ll get all the important points.
> Avoid even audiobooks. (…)
Look, it’s fine if audiobooks don’t work for you, and it’s fine to let your readers know why. But don’t phrase it as advice of audiobooks not working in general. You may get distracted when listening to an audiobook, you may not be able to concentrate on it, but that is definitely not true for everyone. Listening to an audiobook while cooking or cleaning can work like doodling while listening to a lecture, i.e. it helps retention, attention, and understanding.
What a meaningless gatekeeping distinction. Unless your sole goal is to be a poser who wants to be perceived as a literate intellectual who is oh so cultured and well-read, however you consume the book is up to you. Who the heck is thinking “I really want to read more books, but only if it’s in the way this stranger tells me I should, not the way I enjoy”?
If you like reading paper books, good. If you like reading electronic books, good. If you like listening to audiobooks, good. If you like having your partner lovingly transcribe a book into individual postcards and mail them to you weekly, good. Consume the book however you want and don’t judge others by their preference.
There are many reasons why someone might want to improve their reading, and the only solution to that is to practice reading.
Audiobooks are someone else's (i.e. not your) interpretation of a work. Kind of like how you might go watch a play or a movie instead of reading a script. There's nothing wrong with either of those things, but they're not reading.
> There's nothing wrong with either of those things, but they're not reading.
Why are you compelled to defend that (in my view) meaningless distinction? Why does it matter? I’m asking genuinely, so I can understand why we’re having this conversation.
I am somewhat biased against audiobooks as well, but how do you justify that consuming text, language, words is substantially different between reading and listening? Particularly in novels and the like? If you aren't re-reading passages, and only processing lines of text in a linear fashion, how is that any different from listening to a transcription?
I dont know you about you, but the reason I read is to learn and retain -- many studies havnt shown audiobooks are much worse than reading for retention.
> I dont know you about you, but the reason I read is to learn and retain
Millions of people read for entertainment. If you ask the people who read Fifty Shades and other erotic novels¹, how many do you think would say they do it “to learn and retain”? In fact, not retaining is something I would like to do with certain pieces of media, so I could reexperience their impact.
Have you ever listened to a good audiobook for a fictional story? There are fantastic versions of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett stories where the voice acting really brings them to life in a way many readers cannot with their internal voice (see, for example, aphantasia). How about a book written by a comedian, read by the author? Having them read the funny bits with the intended delivery and in their own voice feels like you’re enjoying another of their stand-ups. They sometimes even go slightly off-script and make jokes not in the written book. Again: Consume books however you like and let others do the same. Why does it concern you how other people enjoy their books?
¹ No judgement. Smut is a big market and you do you as long as you’re not hurting anyone else.
Yeah I'm trying the same thing, I have an e-reader which is compact enough to have with me. Reddit is entertaining but it's only good for like half an hour a day at best, after which point you start to scrape the bottom of the barrel / niche posts and a lot of repeats. At one point I realised I was reading the same posts three times a day hoping for something new, but that's not how it works.
You reminded me of the 10 years I spent loading up Achewood every week after it was functionally ended. (Although recently I discovered Onstad has a Patreon, and is regularly drawing new comics again behind the paywall). Most of the internet feels the same way, but there are still pockets of creativity. If you can tolerate a podcast (or a radio play, if you prefer), I really enjoyed listening to the first season of Valley Heat last year. Very silly. A friend linked it to me, and I surprised myself by actually giving it a try; I am glad that I did.
I wouldn't blindly trust a brand new author in 2026, but it's very easy to trust an author that has put out good writing in years past. Not hard to find, there has been plenty of great books written after 2023.
New authors however will certainly have to earn trust for a few years now I think.
It's similar with music, if someone puts out their first album in 2026 and has no singles or EPs, no YouTube presence, etc., it's probably slop. If they have a body of work that goes back a few years, easy to trust.
I don't understand caring about 'slop' in creative media. Its pressingly more important in programming because there are a lot of bugs linters, complicated language models and even fuzzy sandbox searches can't catch. Even if they did, coding is collaborative work and maintaining vibecoded infra is a genuine hassle. However, none of these apply to music or books. AI or not, humane feelings always shapes a piece to its last form and its entirely up to you to determine if you like it or not. AI generally fails to capture this, and if it didn't - a fluke -, why not enjoy the piece?
There's only so much time we have. If I can filter out a category of music (slop) I know from experience I'm 99% likely to not enjoy I'd like to be able to.
I for one can't enjoy a piece of creative media made by AI because I know it only exists so that a handful of losers can profit off the wholesale theft of actual human creativity. Other people don't share these qualms (they are also losers) and that's their choice. Honestly, I could give a fuck if AI tanks coding because I think the internet as we now know it is a mistake of capitalism and if using the plagiarism machine causes codebase maintenance to be harder, aww shucks sucks to suck, guess that's your job now? IDK, I'm married to an artist/writer and was a cook for most of my 20s so I have become a neo-luddite in my middle age when it comes to this specific topic.
Weird how "where you are in the world" affects your view of things, right?
Why does it matter whether the writing is AI generated or not?
You should always be critical of everything you read. I have stopped reading plenty of books after a few chapters when I realized there was little value in it for me.
Yet a good enough reader can distinguish between appearance and content. Better yet, everyone has their own type of favourite content. Maybe someone out there enjoys a 300 page Claude essay, you never know. Therefore the 'books after 2023?' argument is senseless sans the purchase part in which the contents may not be immediately obvious.
Wow, you are drinking the corporate kool-aid eagerly.
The brain understands concepts. I can say, for example, "a penny saved is a penny earned" and understand that I'm talking about money and savings in general. I've felt the satisfaction of a full bank account and the panic of a near-empty one.
The AI knows that someone once wrote the words "a penny saved is a penny earned" in that order. It has ingested volumes of wise sayings and economic texts to facilitate the statistically accurate words which will follow previous words in the conversation.
You're just describing different ways of learning concepts. Learning from lived experience and learning from reading the experience of the others are both valid.
AI is doing a lot more than just regurgitating facts. It can take abstract concepts and apply them reasonably well in novel scenarios.
To make things more concrete, how about you name a specific concept that you believe a frontier model can't grasp?
If AI was learning and understanding, this would have been solved in 2024. As it is, it's just predicting words that are likely to answer the question.
You're slurping up the excrement of corporations if you think AI is "learning" from reading others' experiences. All it is learning - all it can learn - is what words are likely to appear one after another, with no semantic understanding.
First of all, that's already a solved problem for current frontier models. Give me a specific example if you don't believe me.
Second of all, not being able to properly spell a word doesn't mean one doesn't have a semantic understanding of the concepts the word represent. Do you think an illiterate person is incapable of intelligence?
I already gave a specific example. And since your second paragraph shows that you don't understand what generative AI even is or how it works, you have got some learning due before you continue to discuss AI.
The code is also not immediately available, which makes claims towards any chain of trust somewhat dubious.
And I'm not sure what purist really means in this context, and how a rolling release is - or even implies - inherently "pure" Unix. If systemd is the hill to die on, Void is active and supported.
Usually I default to encouragement; I don't mean to put any water on OP's fire, yet there's a whole lot of grand words in these essays. And really not a lot of explaining why any of this would make me switch from, for example, Arch, or that explain which problems are being solved.
It's Void with GUIs around runit and xbps. The problem being attempted is that Void is not very accessible to users new to Linux. This is pretty clear from the website.
It is very valuable when you have various bundles of services, such as satellites, AI, and so on, to keep pace with the majors so that you keep pace with their valuation.
These stacking valuations are not additive, they're multiplicative because you additionally market investors to the synergy between them.
Having the third best model statistically is extremely useful in this context.
The weaknesses can be multiplicative as well. One division bleeding capex can drag down all the rest, no matter how well they might be doing. And the P/E ratio on all of them is riding unrealistic expectations, which can actually be fine for a long time but forces growth even in areas where it doesn't make sense. (Maybe that's where the "let's build data centers in a high radiation hard vacuum!" nonsense comes in; you just need a story of how the P/E ratio is possible to justify in the future? No need to argue over likelihood, just have a tale to tell?)
Starlink doesn't qualify? Because that's a practically unbelievable track record. It's easy to say it's obvious, but it was only obvious in hindsight (or perhaps to Elon, but I think the reason that it was successful was actually more about him just being relentless)
I'm not an Elon acolyte, but as with his other enterprises (SpaceX, Tesla), he succeeded where others (Irridium etc) repeatedly failed.
It's really hard to argue that he got lucky when he keeps pulling these really extremely high capex and hard-tech and business successes off so cleanly, especially when you see the entrenched opposition (govt, politics, competitors) that's been arrayed against him.
> The pattern is unambiguous. In townlands still unserved by mid-2026, LEO provider Starlink has grown relentlessly and now accounts for 14.3% of fixed samples, approaching one in seven. In townlands where fiber arrived in 2021 and 2022, Starlink’s share has remained below 2% for five years, with no growth despite the same marketing, pricing, and availability.
(The context is that Ireland has spent the last six years building a fibre network for every rural premises in the country, which is now almost done; it will be complete late this year or early next.)
The problem for Starlink is, it works okay as a business model... Until fibre arrives. Then it's dead. So, long-term, Starlink's market is, essentially, countries which are too poor to do a rural fibre rollout (and bear in mind that it has become much cheaper to do so). Like, what's the bull case for Starlink? In a decade, you've got to assume that areas unserved by fibre won't really be a thing in the developed world.
>Like, what's the bull case for Starlink? In a decade, you've got to assume that areas unserved by fibre won't really be a thing in the developed world.
Fiber is better once it's installed, but installing it is hard.
Rural areas in the United States have been promised fiber for a very long time and it's still nowhere close to universal. Some policymakers have decided that we should fix this with massive federal subsidies but the rollout botched so thoroughly that it became the anecdote of choice for Ezra Klein as he promoted his "Abundance" book.
I was just at my in-laws' in rural PA; unreliable Internet that runs at about 6Mbps down costs around USD$70 a month, and that was after my father-in-law haggled to get the bill down. I pitched him on Starlink, which is now cheaper than that.
It's a lot cheaper to put up a 5G tower than to run fiber. I'm not sure about Starlink's costs to launch but I know for sure they don't have to deal with the provincial fights that happen over trying to be the second service provider in a municipality.
There are plenty of places in the developed world where it just doesn't make financial sense to roll out fibre. In NZ about 90% of the country has fibre access... probably that number will creep a bit higher. But I doubt it'll ever reach 100%.
Whether or not Starlink can build a business on selling broadband to <10% of the developed world I don't know.
I mean see above. The Irish rural fibre programme was specifically for premises where it would not be economic for the other fibre networks to roll out. It was _expensive_ (probably about 4000 euro per premises in the end), but it worked.
I was pretty sceptical of NBI when it was announced, but it really does seem to have worked out. If Ireland, which is historically very bad at big state projects and which has an unusually dispersed rural population (we were much later to restrict ribbon development than other developed countries), can do it, I don’t see why any rich country can’t.
Ireland is actually pretty compact compared to Africa or Siberia or South America or central Asia, and those are almost certainly not as wealthy as Ireland per-capita.
Are you arguing that there's no economic value to bringing internet to underserved regions like vast territories? Or that those people would be unwilling to pay for it? (They seem to be quite willing to buy mobile phones.)
I don’t think they’re likely to pay enough to justify a high valuation. And remember you’re basically talking just very rural areas in the long term; towns and villages can be hooked up increasingly cheaply. Like, Starlink is maybe a viable medium-sized telco. Maybe even a large one; they might hit Vodafone scale (though probably with a worst cost structure; a lot of Vodafone’s business is just reselling other peoples’ fibre). Note that Vodafone isn’t valued at multiple trillions.
Ultimately, it’s hard to be high margin as a telco.
Backend under AGPL prevents someone hosting it as a service. AGPL specifies that hosting _is_ distribution. Therefore, anyone hosting it must do so with public code. This provides a soft form of exclusivity to run their own Cloud.
A frontend, permitting customizability, white-labeling, and so on, makes more sense to be more permissive.
Grafana is a solid example to illustrate why.
Moved from Apache to AGPLv3 in 2021 specifically so cloud providers couldn't host modified versions without contributing back, while keeping plugins Apache-licensed.
You receive permission to use and modify a piece of software under conditions set by the creator. It is a license, not a gift. If you don’t like the conditions, use something else or create your own thing.
I will never understand these complaints. Not only do you want stuff for free, you also want to impose your preferred usage conditions on the creator. Where does this entitlement come from?
You’re confused. The author chooses to gift their software to the world when they choose a free software license.
Presumably people who choose the AGPL choose it because they believe it is a free software license. Either they should use an actual coherent free software license instead of one that is trying (and probably failing) to also be a EULA, or they should stop pretending that they are releasing free software.
> Prohibiting a user of your software from modifying it and using it to run their business goes against both freedoms 0 and 1.
It does not prohibit modifications - it just demands that those who exercise the freedoms share their modifications under the same license, and most businesses balk at that.
> The anti-commerce bent of a subset of the free software zealots hate business so much...
The root of the problem is actually the anti-free-software bent that business zealots have, because they want to be able take code for free and make money off of it without giving any of their changes back under the same terms; open-source contributors are not suckers to be exploited. Things would be so much better if the moochers weren't trying to capture all of the value downstream of other people's work, but just some or even most of it.
GPL and AGPL don't even prohibit for-profit businesses from using software with those licenses, they just say you don't get to pretend it's your own intellectual property and privatize it.
It's not anti-commerce or anti-business to contractually prohibit selfish entities from absconding with public goods for private gain and refusing to contribute any public good back in the process.
Similar idea to public roads - if you want to use public roads that the rest of us enjoy, pay taxes like the rest of us do. Using public roads without paying taxes doesn't make you a savvy businessman, it makes you an amoral freeloader.
If you want an intellectual property moat, fund the labor to build it yourself. The world doesn't owe you a penny.
I'm not sure what you are complaining about, AGPL is doing nothing against commerce and you are free to fork and sell a service using that fork. Just make sure to provide the code source of your fork to your user so they can also make their own forks, potentially making their own commercial services with them. It might be to most pro commerce licence I know.
That’s simply not true, and you know it. Violating my privacy with a EULA is the issue there. It’s ok to put a EULA on software, but to pretend it’s still free software is the dishonest part.
Please don't take this as a personal dig because it's not meant that way, but this has such berating a girl for not being into you energy. You want something from them, and they just want you to go away, basically. You offer nothing they want, you want what they have.
Nah I mostly don’t use AGPL software because I consider it nonfree, the same way I don’t use any other source-available nonfree stuff.
The issue I have with it is the hypocrisy, not the code. They pretend that it’s free software but it’s just an anti-commercial use restriction EULA.
Anyway, most AGPL stuff is a 48 hour Claude rewrite away from having a free clone these days anyway. (In fact I have done just that several times recently, without even cloning/downloading the AGPL “upstream” repo, just with a vague mental model of what the db schema might be.)
AGPL gives you the same FSF freedoms as GPL or as any other free license, but it does come with an additional responsibility to the end users, not from the end users. AGPL is not in any way uniquely qualifiable as "a EULA". Every single software license, of course, requires you to agree to the license, hence the name. If you put nothing private in the code, AGPL will not impact your privacy. If anything, AGPL helps assure end users that their privacy is being respected.
> Prohibiting a user of your software from modifying it and using it to run their business goes against both freedoms 0 and 1.
Then it's good that it allows both modification and using it to run a business?
> This “users are obligated ‘give back’ the moment they make money with the gift they were given” is nonsense
But they are under no such obligation! They can make all the money they want and give nothing back. They can even modify the software to better serve their business. The only restriction is that if they do so, they have to make their modifications available. Which means they're way ahead of where they were before being given the initial software; why do you feel a software developer who decides to give the world a gift should be restricted in what gift they're giving? "Thanks for the chocolate, but the bar was too small so I didn't have enough left over for my kid to try some. Why do you hate my kid?"
> A business making money using free software doesn’t take anything away from the releasing organization.
First, that is false. They could damage the market for the original software. (And if they don't modify the software, then there's no problem in the first place.)
Second, why are you so hung up on the "making money" part, when that is explicitly allowed by the AGPL? It's just kind of bizarre -- it's a license that says over and over that you can charge for everything related to it, and you're complaining about it being hostile to people who want to charge money for things.
Thinking about it, I'm wondering if this is genuine confusion and you don't know what the AGPL is? If so, maybe start by searching for "charge" in https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html . It has nothing against "using it to run [a] business". There is no "moment they make money with the gift" that changes anything: you are explicitly allowed to charge for anything you like -- distribution, usage of the service, support, whatever.
I'm a Canadian/German dual; a praire, hockey-playing, hard-O Canadian at that.
There is nothing German about me, apart from some family myths.
Every 8 or 9 years my passport renewal at the German embassy plays out like that scene in Inglorious Basterds, where Brad Pitt's character Aldo Rain tries to pose as Italian stunt-man Enzo Gorlami.
There's more going on here than just the substance's effect.
There's a mind body connection that an altered state can throw into disarray.
Under the influence of cannabis, one may be a lot more aware of physical pain, dehydration, and so on. The key word is aware. Suddenly becoming aware of the fact that you are stressed out, you are carrying tension, can lead to something of a latent processing effect of some of these suppressed or physically felt emotions.
However, if you're generally not tense, ingesting cannabis itself does not always raise the heart rate. I can validate this myself right now, given I wear an Apple Watch and can vaporize cannabis. Looking at my historical data, there is no relationship, and my resting heart rate remains in the 40s.
It's anecdotal, but at the same time we need to be careful with something that acts on the physical, the mental, and dare I say it, the spiritual. If we focus too much on one dimension, we lose the important synergy from processing all dimensions.
That's interesting and probably an argument for pro-legalization.
Were I to pick a gateway drug into cocaine, it would be alcohol. It becomes a way to infuse more energy in a later night, which is usually one of alcoholic revelry.
When cannabis is just in a store and it's the only thing there, many potheads just stay in the pothead bubble.
Sauna raises HR without increasing blood pressure though (modulo some possible initial short spike at the beginning), because your blood vessels dilate.
Cannabis causes dilation of blood vessels and elevated HR, it’s the same effect. If you take a big dab you can definitely feel your blood pressure drop and muscles relax even though your heart rate has increased.
There's a saying: don't throw stones if you live in a glass house. The same human mind that rationalizes the intake of substances is the same one that rationalizes social networks, junk food, eating meat, whatever it is. I wouldn't be so quick to condescend.
At some point in time, it's important to realize that not everyone optimizes for longevity, correctness, rationalism, and so on, and they just simply do what makes them feel good within the limited life that they have.
Nothing is intrinsically harmless. Cannabis can be devastating. But I was just sitting here doing work one day, got a hemorrhage in my eye, and lost half the sight in it. Otherwise, I'm supremely healthy. The cause: a gene.
> This is probably the most difficult part. I had to remove all social media and streaming apps from my iPhone. I removed Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, etc. When I started, I found myself picking up the phone and immediately noticing that something was missing, since the only things left to do were check the weather, read boring emails, or see my bank account.
These past few months, I have more resolve than ever to cut the chains. Willpower is a practice, and there have been successful steps towards the goal.
First, blocking the real sucks (X, Reddit). Then news (Canadian, won't bore you with the list). And then an innocuous yet sticky set of apps that I would bounce to often, for little benefit or reason: weather, server stats, stocks. A new wrinkle? Inane conversations with LLMs. Blocked!
HN still because, well brothers and the rare sister, it's lonely out there and this place cracks me up. And not much longer.
Now on to entire devices. Desktop, laptop, destined for a locked-down iPad. Lobotomized iPhone, got a watch, and now, slowly, more and more reading.
What pushed me over the edge is the realization that I'm in grief. The Internet which once shaped my identity today, in no defensible way, resembles the silly place which once gave me solace. And yet, like a husk I cling to the teet of these manipulative networks and websites hoping for one last, satisfying drink.
It ain't comin'. Books, then. Like my mother.