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Comment by compiler-devel | Hacker News Reader

You can meaningfully recreate this world today for a personal, non-work environment. For a PC, what do you really need a persistent internet connection for? If you have a Mac, create a couple of network locations, one "Offline" (all internet-connected network adaptors disabled) and another "Online." Keep a habit of leaving it at the "Offline" unless you really need to go online for something. This is what we did thirty years ago with dial-up.

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You can, but what does it help? Modern OSes are architected assuming an always-online, the-world-ends threat model. Thus causes them to be heavily locked down, eliminating a lot of the customizability and hackability that older systems had.

And that’s not to mention applications. It used to be common for GUI applications to be scriptable and to support plugins!

It's worth experimenting with. Some things won't work at all, others will break in Fun And Interesting Ways. Some things will get much slicker though because they suddenly don't have network I/O anywhere near the UI, or because ads aren't sucking CPU any more. It's worth at least understanding where your common workflows are on that spectrum.

It might help your focus, if you're the type who is easily distracted with the web or by notifications. That extra bit of friction to switch locations to enable the network might be enough to get you to second guess whether or not you really need to look at that thing online.

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