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Comment by stra1ghtarrow90 | Hacker News Reader

part of the problem is that most people don't own a pc or personal laptop - they use their phone and apps. None of my friends (35 years +) use laptops other than for work and openly say how much they have regressed technically. Some of these guys grew up with the internet in the early 00's and would be setting up switches for lan partys, using torrents and usenxt, limewire etc. These days they can barely open up microsoft word - but on instagram/twitter they're all over it. Sad really. I would always reach for my laptop first before my phone and I tend to very rarely visit social media sites (other than reddit) on laptop/desktop. I use glance - https://github.com/glanceapp/glance to parse my rss feeds - it's pretty good.

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Yeah, I don't think the true scale of the "war on general computation" is apparent for many technical people: It's good to think about alternative distribution models for the internet, better use of protocols, etc - but a large and growing number of users literally don't have (administrative) control over their client devices anymore.

The "cognitive control" of tech companies is underpinned by a much more concrete technical control of the devices.

>but a large and growing number of users literally don't have (administrative) control over their client devices anymore.

would those users have had devices over which they had administrative control in the past though? Perhaps for software to eat the world, and for hardware to get distributed far enough that it could, a percentage of the world had to forego administrative rights when getting that hardware.

I suppose those who miss it can still get it, although yes, for how much longer is a question.

I always find it strange when people refer to twitter and YouTube etc as apps rather than websites.

That's what they are by now, though. The websites of social media sites are crippled and bug-ridden - try using Instagram in a browser, for example. They want to coerce you into using their apps, because that gives them better tracking opportunities.

Sometimes. YouTube (and Google Maps, and old.reddit.com but not default reddit) I find to be better on the website than the app.

That's just what I've been doing after deleting Instagram from my. phone. I can't trust my evening dopamine-seeking behaviour with the phone app, but there's much much less stickiness in the browser.

Tried greyscale yet?

Yes, it does help. But it's too easily switched off. I basically have to be my own worst enemy I have to order to prevent myself from being my own worst enemy!

Have you tried just not using a smartphone? I have a flip phone I take with me and leave my iPhone at home for things that need it. Otherwise, I carry my laptop/tablet everywhere. If I need to check my social media or email I have to sit down and deliberately do that

I've been resisting this for various reasons. Parking apps, maps, camera, podcast app, many many timers, and banking apps are all phone functions I use quite often and I can't see obvious ways around them which don't involve lots of other gubbins which I will inevitably lose or forget.

I could possibly uninstall everything but the absolute necessities on a smartphone for when I need it, and otherwise carry a flip phone. Maybe use the flip phone for tethering so the smartphone doesn't need a Sim card. But it seems that might be introducing lot of extra stress into my life, especially for stressful jobs like parking before a meeting, keeping up to date with clients, etc

Lol try using those sites in your browser. You’ll see why they’re typically called apps real quick.

It’s funny, I’ve never installed any of the apps because I figured if, with all their engineering, they can’t even build a usable website, why would I trust their native code?

My 8yo keeps calling any piece of software he can run an "app", regardless of it being on a computer, a website, or a mobile device. I object to it out of principle, old man yelling at clouds style. But fundamentally, it's just code I interact with to do something, I'm just used to using different terminology for each runtime. The term website came about right before we really had anything interactive on the W3, describing something rather static.

All this to say, we're both right and wrong in feeling this way lol

Please try to encourage them to open up LibreOffice Writer rather than Microsoft Word though! They should not have to suffer with CoPilot and MS spying on you all the time.

https://www.libreoffice.org/

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