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Comment by adreamingsoul | Hacker News Reader

I think his heart is in the right place, but the execution is over-reactive.

Here are my ideas that I want to implement for myself: 1. Move back to dumb phones, landlines, or a wifi phone. 2. Limit movie/video consumption to a fixed time limit per day. For example, 1 hour a day. 3. Re-use old technology/re-cycle technology waste before buying new. 4. Move back to bare metal servers, and self-host. 5. Use simpler technologies that have no environmental impact. 6. Only invest in technology that is repairable and long-lasting.

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> I think his heart is in the right place, but the execution is over-reactive.

I feel similarly.

Over the past year or so I've had a set of changes in personal lifestyle and philosophy. I've become very anti-possessions and very anti-technology. At first, getting rid of all social media, cell-phones, TVs, and such. Being a software engineer, I have to have a computer, and I kept my old iPod Touch, stuck on iOS 6, for music and reading a few eBooks (shout-out to the Kindle folks, the old versions still work!).

I'm slowly forming a sort-of Amish Hackers[0] rubric for evaluation. Does something help or hurt personal physical and mental well-being, does it help social unit cohesion, or is it purely consumptive and or narcissistic? As a result, I've slowly brought some things back.

Do I need smartphone to take selfies so I can become "Instagram famous?" No. But communicating on-the-go is necessary, so a feature phone it is. Do I need a TV? Do I need a fancy Fight Club Ikea apartment? No. But I do need a place where I can reasonably entertain guests.

Like most things, it's about finding a healthy balance between "consumer zombie" and "Richard Stallman Impersonator of the Year."

[0] - http://kk.org/thetechnium/amish-hackers-a/

I appreciate the Amish Hackers reference, thank you.

Agreed. The steps that he's taking are too drastic.

I really like the steps that you're taking. I feel like the issue that the author fell into is that he... cares too much about too many things? I know that sounds selfish, but by focusing on improving ourselves I feel like we can all help build a better society.

Bare metal self-hosting is cost-ineffective and over-complicated, and will never happen at any non-trivial scale. Even among the competent people, most of us simply have better things to do after work.

We need something like an app store for self-hosted apps, on top of a mesh/P2P network with built-in load balancing, redundancy, and sandboxing; ideally with a distributed data-store. Installing and running Wekan should be no more difficult than creating a Trello account, and should provide a similar level of service availability (say within three nines). Until then, self-hosting is completely infeasible for >99% of the global population.

All of this is technically feasible, someone just has to do the hard work.

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