notes.

The more I use the internet, the more I get the urge to go offline. That urge comes from two sources:

1. The amount of tracking big tech does on your life.
2. The amount of time big tech takes from your life.

First of all, I don’t appreciate that every verb I act on (what I see, what I like, how much time I spend, how many times I scroll, who I share it with, how I type, etc) is being logged somewhere in order to create a profile of myself to who knows who.

Especially in an age where data leaks have become common, which means anyone (especially bad actors) might have access to that profile of yours soon enough.

No, thank you. 🙄

Not being tracked is only a preventive measure against possible future targets. That’s very important, but not as urgent.

The immediate problem is our time and attention:

• How much of the present we’re giving away for a couple of minutes on our phones while we walk around the house to take a shit, or grab a cup of coffee.
• How we’re reinforcing our short-term reward, and how it is making us bored way to quickly, to the point where a movie, or a book, or even a conversation with a friend cannot satisfy our brains needs for dopamine.
• How our thoughts and ideas get shaped by the content we watch, and since all the content is shorter and more intense, we never get to deeply explore these concepts in our heads, or with other people around us.

Imagine if the 2-8 hours you spent on social media could be used to deeply focus on improving some aspect of your life.

That’s over 1,000 hours on average per year. That’s 60,000 seconds.

That is why I am making this change: abandoning the comfort of my online tools, detaching from the digital world little by little, and returning to tools like physical books, pen and paper, and in-person conversations.

We’re so accustomed to the velocity of output generated by such few inputs in the digital world that we forget to slow down our minds. That was said by Aaron Draplin on an interview.

When I want to watch YouTube, it’s usually one of these things: entertainment, or learning. I get very annoyed when I look at my Subscribed tab, and see LOTS of short-form content (shorts). It clutters my dashboard. I never click it. It makes scanning the stuff I actually want to watch very hard.

Thanks to Rach Smith I can have a clean YouTube view (without shorts). And you can too!

It’s especially easy if you have the Arc Browser.

All you do is go to youtube.com, and create a new boost by pressing command + T, and typing: “new boost”.

Then you add this bit of CSS:

/* Grid View */
#items.ytd-grid-renderer>ytd-grid-video-renderer:has(ytd-thumbnail-overlay-time-status-renderer[overlay-style="SHORTS"]) {
  display: none;
}

/* List View */
ytd-item-section-renderer:not(:has(ytd-grid-renderer)):has(ytd-thumbnail-overlay-time-status-renderer[overlay-style="SHORTS"]) {
  display: none; 
} 

And that’s it!

We all know that it is going to happen. It’s not a question of if, but when [social media mediums] will collapse.

For those who were using Twitter primarily for ephemeral chatter, all this isn’t that tragic. But for others, all their posts, conversations, and connections on the social network were a significant part of their online identity.

That’s exactly the feeling I had (when there were rumors it was going away), and the feeling I have every time I see some major change in how algorithms make it harder to maintain these connections.

As we move towards a surveillance heavy world, where AI can take scrapped data from careless social networks — who store too much information about us — and do whatever they want, It makes it more important to review how we use the internet.

One of the changes is getting your own domain and hosting your content. It’s yours to create, publish, modify. It’s your copyright. And you decide what to share (it’s not like Instagram, which logs your calls).

The only problem with personal websites is the lack of communication between your peers. Things like webmentions should help, but it’s not the most elegant solution. It’s not Twitter, where you can reply to your heros, and actually get a response back.

But then, I wonder if that availability makes it hard for people with a large audience to filter down bad agents from their lives — something most major social media platforms have tried to mitigate, almost always unsuccessfully, throughout the years.

Enough with the ramble.

This post by Matthias is definitely worth the reading.

SerenityOS is a love letter to ’90s user interfaces with a custom Unix-like core. It flatters with sincerity by stealing beautiful ideas from various other systems.

View on GitHub

Biological organisms are an oddity in the Universe because they maintain internal order in constantly changing environments. That is, they defy entropy by virtue of how they manage energy to stay alive.