I'm tired of being on the network
matduggan.com
matduggan.com
But Ali Express is not one of those. It's very feasible to delete the app, or at least turn off the notifications. The quality of TV writing may have taken a nosedive but nobody is forcing you to watch TikTok Empire. If you long for the golden age of television, you can find disc versions of The Wire, Mad Men, The Sopranos etc. Often they're free to borrow at your local library. The App Store is indeed garbage, but I open it a handful of times per year and probably spend less than a minute to search for the app I want and install it.
The argument about losing control to devices would be much more effective if the examples weren't mainly cases where the user clearly has control.
Then you look and see it made it to your country last week and give a gentle nod to the app, then close it. Because you know, "any day now, I'll have 1000 of that $0.01 thing."
You mean, then you disconnect the presentation layer.
Well of course, most of HN is extremely privileged and thus isolated from such problems. I wouldn't expect the average tech worker in a gated community or access controlled apartment complex to get it.
Even for the narrow segment of society in that situation, you're not required to give your money to Apple and then stay home 24/7 to immediately scoop up your packages. You could get a lockbox too, and guess what, they're cheaper than phones.
> going door to door between cornfields with a mile between houses
That's not the type of situation most people live in.
>don't assume everyone lives the same life as you
Likewise.
> Overall, total estimated annual losses range from a low of $5.2 billion in 2023 to $16 billion in 2024
> In 2024, the U.S. ecommerce market reached an estimated $1.22 trillion in revenue
So... between 0.4% and 1.3% of packages by value are affected, concentrated in specific geographic areas. A narrow segment of society highly affected, complaining often and making the issue seem wider than it is. The rest of us living our lives as normal.
I would complain very loudly as well.
> 29.7% of U.S. households experienced package theft within a single 12-month period.
That seems like enough households to make tracking an important feature for most retailers.
While many of those packages might be classified as junk, others might contain medicine for your child or an auto part needed to get to work.
https://www.omnisend.com/porch-pirates/?utm_source=gemini&hl...
CTV covered [1] how it was only roughly one-in-ten annually as well, which is again a far cry from the numbers in the states.
Does it happen? Yes. Is tracking a harder requirement for Americans due to a lower-trust society? I would say yes as well. Personally, I consider it nice to have, not required.
[0] https://globalnews.ca/news/6196297/canada-porch-pirates-fede...
[1] https://www.ctvnews.ca/toronto/article/one-out-of-10-canadia...
So the junkies look for the bright yellow letters and open your packages. If it was clothes you will find them somewhere on the street close by
Going back to your original post, now that we have some numbers to work with, do you really believe that 70.3% of Americans are "extremely privileged" people living in gated communities?
I'm tired of convincingly presented falsehoods. I hate being on my phone. I also can't stop being on my phone.
Also fat cells are endocrinologically active, so they try to compel the person to, well, get fatter.
I've been doing this the hard way lately and there's still much that I don't know, because food and lifestyles used to be different, so my parents only told me what they knew from theirs.
To illustrate just how different, my great-grandmother reportedly disliked food that she described as "rich" - too calorie dense for her taste. By this definition cottage cheese was "rich".
I’m not sure I can really believe the often cited claim that a major component here is a lack a knowledge. Does anyone truly believe Cheetos are as good or better for you than broccoli?
The most obvious explanation to me is that we are just flooded with addictive food and bombarded with ads to entice us. That and healthy food presents more friction in terms of having to buy the ingredients and prepaid it, and we are all short on time and overstressed.
This and most research points at eating habits being formed within the first few years of life. Once imprinted on you they are very very difficult to change.
So the measures, in no particular order, but vaguely resemblign an escalation ladder:
1. Get a shittier phone. Something worth 100 eurobucks from aliexpress working on a slow mtk soc, outdated android and all that
2. Disable all notification forever, also incoming call ringtone with a voice mail saying you will return the call tomorrow
3. Get a landline or equivalent land-line like voip phone on a table in a hallway. With a voice mail of course.
4. Start leaving the phone at home when you go for a short walk or somewhere in a shop.
5. When you do take it with you outside, put it in a banana bag under the jacket instead of your pocket and then leave it in the bag when you get back home.
6. obviously remove all of the dopamine junkie apps.
7. don't look at the mail, chats, news, whatever is there before lunch, specifically don't let it be the first thing getting your attention in the morning.
8. doing a prayer 5 times a day and going to mosque or whatever you have to counter balance the influence of shaitain sitting your pocket for the last 10 years.
9. allowing yourself to use junkie apps for a dopamine hit when you actually need it but deciding the time and trigger yourself (separate phone with instagrahm turned off most of the time, only scrolling it while you are outside in the park in a nice setting after having a juicy piece of junk food, icecream or whatever, etc).
Voilà
I'm happy Fastmail (made by a small company) is much better and faster than Gmail (made by a advertising behemoth). Idem with GrapheneOS vs Pixel OS. The less friction, the shortest time spent using the phone, the most time to enjoy spending time outside and with friends.
And if it wasn't for these apps (for example banking apps, since someone decided that it's now impossible to use your homebanking from a PC since it's not secure enough) I would already use a Nokia 3310.
Only thing missing is contactless payment but there are European banks that support GrapheneOS without Google Pay so alternatives exist. And I can use Garmin pay with my watch (and offline and without Garmin Connect thanks to the FOSS GadgetBridge appp) if that was necessary.
The false claims of "It won't work" in HN comments keep getting more bizarre
It's unclear if this is a myth, a misunderstanding or a deliberate falsehood but it's oft repeated
Here the original comment did not even make any claims about mobile banking
But it still triggered a reply with a false assertion about mobile banking
Mobile banking usage differs from country to country
Not every country is the same with respect to mobile banking usage, not to mention mobile usage in general
As for people who would use GrapheneOS, a small segment of conscientious mobile users, I wonder how many have or could end up with multiple phones as a result of planned obsolescence and forced "upgrades"
In such cases they might have one phone that runs a corporate mobile OS and "approved" apps and another that runs a non-corporate OS that runs "unapproved" apps
There are many possibillities
But then don't do anything money related with it or use any important account details.
This also prevents spending too much money on impulsive purchases and take-away thai food when you should know better.
If I lock myself out of the browser, cut all communications, miss a phone call, I’ll not be able to do “something” that is not socially acceptable not to do. Life will create a situation, and make me feel like I’m doing something wrong, maybe I am.
Then there is all the good things, that article that got you hooked on a new idea, that contact that got you a better job, that friend you miss in another continent. My kid would not exist were not for the internet. When you are in a bad day you will convincingly argue it’s for the greater good, maybe you are even right that it was.
There is porn when you are horny, delivery services when you are tired and hungry, a map when you are lost, hobby items you can’t find locally, podcasts when you are lonely, all the music.
I think I’m not wired in a way that can healthily separate the good and the bad in a society that also can’t. I know something is wrong, but I don’t think I can fix it with tech.
I get that I'm an outlier, but I'd worry more about the people that launch it across the room the minute they get home. Of course, if you're always picking it up and checking social media, that's also a problem.
But also, dispose of it properly, we don't need polluted rivers full of garbage smart phones.
> people who love being connected (implies =>) never leave it
You don't love being connected, so the author isn't claiming anything about you.
Obviously, we shouldn't let this happen. Keep paper tickets, physical menus, cash, etc. These things are human, made by and for humans. They make sense across the intelligence spectrum as they connect to us in the physicality of the real (which everyone understands).
Of course, the individual doesn't get to decide if all his government and city services app-ify themselves. What to do in that case? I guess this guy's chosen the path of minimal leashing: wearing the digital yoke as little as possible. That's just harm minimization though.
Perhaps it'll help someone to say this: It is possible to live without a smartphone. I do it. There's times when you can't use a service. QR codes are meaningless. You might occasionally be bored. I've always found an alternative or workaround to these issues. Yes, that's inconvenient sometimes (usually not though, surprisingly), but is that worse than being a slave to glass slab?
This seems a bit dramatic. The issue is who is making the decisions. People have stopped being intentional about their decision-making, in a variety of ways, and tend to simply go with whatever the company providing the software recommends. This is the thing that we need to change. Using these services and using a smartphone are fine. We need to find a way to do it on our own terms, though.
The tech industry has spent the last 20 years (and really in earnest the last 15, accelerating over time) making their tech as addictive as possible.
Current tech is egregiously addictive. It’s worse than most drugs.
The big tech companies are now the most successful drug dealers in history.
People don't want to admit this because it is uncomfortable to blamed by the problems you yourself create, but if you are addicted to your phone to the point that you feel compelled to complain about the network (on the network, mind you), then it is entirely because you let yourself get addicted and you still let yourself keep being addicted.
The most insane part of this is the subtle-as-a-hammer-to-the-face MiSTER ad shoved in the middle of the article as if it made any sense whatsoever. And people are taking this guy seriously?
Come on now.
IMO the closest corollary we have is gambling. Most countries place strict limits on gambling, because it's so incredibly addictive to some people. We can see this very obviously in the rise of online gambling platforms like Polymarket it recent years. Without regulation, a lot of people will get sucked in and their lives will be destroyed.
I encourage you to read up on how addiction works. Your comment implies a severe lack of understanding about the subject. Alternatively, you could take a course on addiction at your local college. Always good to get educated!
Come on now.
The trillions are effective at forcing network effects, but anything outside that it pretty trivial to swap out and get a better experience.
I'm a bit surprised by the fatalism on display in this discussion. I get that it sounds like I'm victim-blaming, but you can only alter your own behavior, so assuming responsibility has merit.
I think it is as easy as setting boundaries: practice meditation. Learn to enjoy sitting and doing nothing, both in the living room and sitting outside.
Then when the time is right, work hard for several hours to get important stuff done.
Food tastes best when we are very hungry, so we must go long periods of time doing mini-fasting a few times a day in order to enjoy food. Similarly, earning a living or experimenting with tech should be something that you sit down and do for a while, then do something else.
Knowing you skipped a pizza and it's still available in the freezer (plus you still don't need to buy another one to replace it, yet) after growing up feeling overweight, eventually being overweight, and feeling the same during both periods - the price is an electricity bill for the freezer, not priceless.
Also people need to hate ads more. A single unwarranted notification will get me to disable all notifications or uninstall your app. If you don't hate ads enough, you'll find yourself being shown ads.
AliExpress is very much a user choice issue. It’s not a necessary service and it has a wide variety of competitors.
But the Apple OS nags for free trials and services should be something that is illegal under antitrust law. iOS and Android are the only two viable operating systems on the market for cellular phones. They are a duopoly. We shouldn’t be forced through promotions and ads in the basic operating system functionality just to have a basic communication device.
And we can say all we want about feature phones and flip phones and other similar alternatives but that’s bologna. 99.9% of customers are buying iOS or Android. From a numbers perspective there are no other options.
While I agree that the user shouldn't install unnecessary apps and probably remove most of what's installed, this is playing a rigged game. On the one side a person who want to do something, on the other end countless very well founded teams trying to exploit our monkey brains.
You don't need the Ali Express app to track your orders, yet the author seems to think so. If you think this is a rigged game then just don't play it.
Use your phone for what you need and let it be the end of it. The author is complaining about things as if someone were putting a gun to their head and forcing them to use the Ali Express to track their orders.
I think the population starting to age is an interesting one -- the first one playing more-complex 2D + 3D games from an early age. I'm in this age group. In a world with nothing left to explore, and humans globally connected by commercialism, I think you don't need to be bothered with what capitalism is making of the world. Our brains are hooked on solving imaginary, complex problems. We're all on some weird ship at sea, migrating toward some unknown old-age destination. Probably an MMO.
It sounds like the author got locked in some sort of, "I follow" loop where he got used to trusting certain companies to keep him interested and entertained, then they sold out to ads and the lowest common denominator of entertainment audiences.
The Internet is the same as it's always been! There's infinite ways to use it, full of all sorts of fun communities, new hobbies to spend too much money on (hehe), and endless amounts of people to engage with.
If your iPhone is bothering you that much, maybe it's time to try Android or go totally off the grid (so to speak) and install something like GrapheneOS on a used phone (the horror!).
How about designing your own damned phone? It's not impossible. Make a thick ass brick with a huge battery and dual screens that barely fits in your pocket but can do amazing things a normal phone can't: Give it an IR emitter so you can turn off TVs from a distance. A CO2 sensor so you can tell when any room you're in is getting stuffy. A friggin laser projector. Whatever!
Instead of being a passive intake of all things corporate Internet, make something. Contribute!
I'm old. I was in college when the first personal computers made their debut. I was a married adult when I got my first computer (a Timex 1000). I was a father by the time the Internet appeared in public. The first cell phone I used (not owned) was the size and weight of a brick.
I keep thinking that, though it's been abused and in many ways turned against us, this is the world many of us dreamed of. Baby Boomers grew up wanting Star Trek communicators. When we got Commodore 64s and Apple IIs, we wanted them to be portable. When they became portable, we wanted them to be connected everywhere.
Just because greed and scrabbling for power corrupted the people who made all these dreams come true, it doesn't mean the dreams didn't come true. We asked for the tech, and we got it. Now I guess we have to take responsibility for how we use it.
I think my killer feature would be a phone that is only configurable at a laptop. You can install whatever you want, but it has to be at the laptop. Website allow lists on the laptop. You can uninstall and block things on the phone but you can’t reinstall or unblock them until you’re back at your computer.
I feel like all the screen time features are intentionally under designed. Their incentives are obviously to keep you in your phone as long as possible, while making you feel like they care.
iOS also has another way to dumb down the phone by limiting which apps are available: https://www.tomsguide.com/phones/apple-buried-a-perfect-dumb...
My solution is to remember: when you're living in hell, you still have to go to work in the morning. And at some point you'll start knowing the demons' names and make small talk about how their kids are doing in college. How can you bring a little joy to a bad situation? Do a strange little wiggle dance and go sideways instead of staying on the pre-assigned track that's been laid out for you.
1. Don't install any proprietary apps - open source only. 99% of these problems and ads go away. 2. Use an ad blocker in a browser that lets you use one. 3. Do not allow any notification except literally urgent things like a phone call or message from your partner.
If you do these things then the phone once again becomes a tool that serves you.
Once when I was trying to join a pickleball class they required an app to sign up. There was no web, email, phone, or paper based way to do the thing. I emailed them to suggest they use a ticketing system that does not require the app because many people don't want to install an app, and then I signed up for pickleball at a different club that didn't require an app.
One of our bank accounts has an authenticator which is a proprietary app. I run that on an old tablet so I don't have to run it on my phone.
This was inconvenient and I do understand that this is happening to people more and more. There is often a less convenient option to do the thing though, and I think it's good to try to use the less convenient option and tell organisations that you don't want to use an app. Basic resistance 101. Maybe people have forgotten how to be inconvenienced for the sake of principles.
Denmark and it's laws sound particularly difficult.
Edit: I realise it is a privilege to be able to take the inconvenient option and resist installing apps. If you are not able to resist because of your circumstances, I will continue to resist for you.
I didn't realize until the very end, but his writing embues the distinctive latent resentment common among millennials whose family had a Mac in the 90s.
They can still be that way. Using Linux, I tinker around with hardware, local network and security, software-defined radio, etc. Of course I get online and pore through support docs, email, some idle browsing like a normal person. but I do a pretty good job of separating the internet from my primary uses, at least for full-blown computers.
And that is why I will never use Windows for personal use. That separation becomes impossible. I don't want to be immediately jacked in to datafeeds from the internet and have my uniqueness assimilated by the borg.
Look, I understand the issues the author has with our current world, though I'd argue there are methods to avoid many of the things they mention (like ads). But it was hard to follow between the silly examples (Steam Deck games needs updates? And?) and the legit issues. Also I'm not sure what kind of rose-colored glasses they are wearing but I will never agree that the "ads were interesting" on AM or FM radio. Thankfully I was not subjected to radio, and the ads which I abhor, for long before I gained control over what I wanted to listen to and when. To pine for such times is anathema to me.
This is such an incredibly pessimistic look at our present. I'll be the first to tell you about what I see as wrong in our society and the author make a number of salient points, but we live in an age of wonder. Yes, there is bad, plenty of it, avoid it is hard but not impossible. Or maybe I'm just an earlier version of the author who still believes in a Star Trek future (TNG/Voy/DS9, not the crap they are putting now, though Lower Decks was a joy).
My phone is a freaking tricorder, I control robots in my house, I turn on/off the lights with my voice, and I can build new software by talking to my computer. I don't deny the bad, nay, evil in the world, but what a bleak outlook this author paints.
Shut up man. Bar Starfleet Academy and the atrocious Section 31, recent Trek output has been great—don’t you fucking dare complain about Discovery.
But I agree with you that the author is just whining for the sake of whining. It’s a bunch of nonsensical unrelated complains on entertainment options that they could very well just stop using and nothing would change in their life.
I mean, dude is literally complaining about the network ON THE NETWORK. Fuck’s sake, man, just put down the goddamned phone and be done with it.
The problem is that unlocking your phone is like entering a casino, where everything conspires against your best intentions.
For the authors complaints about ads, I recommend paying for ad free versions of things you truly enjoy. Budgeting will mean you consume less and have fewer choices, but enjoy it more. And if something doesn't offer an ad free experience you can pay for, that's a great reason not to use it.
I consider myself a total 100% Internet-loving Geeky Nerd. And yet I never had (oh well, I did register and post 1-2 posts N years ago) Twitter, Twitcher, Threads, MySpace, Instagram, TikTok, Red Book, Facebook, any other -book for that matter, no Youtube channel, and I very rarely watch it. I also never "get information" from these. I don't understand how people do it.
So every time I got a "rabbit hole itch", I went straight to Google, lost in some niche blogs or forums.
Nowadays, of course, the Internet is gone - you can't Google a non-LLM blog, or there are just no non-LLM blogs anymore? So I go straight to Deep Research. I don't enjoy it, but I would never think to find my information on Twitter or something. Sometimes I will read a book. There are niche books with info that LLMs do not have, or have but it's shallow.
For "news" I have my trusty RSS feed from the days of Google Reader (now on Newsblur, happy customer for many years). If something starts to spam, I mute it.
Maybe all of this is just because I'm a loner without any friends. That's one possible reason.
I also don't have any streaming services. Everything you need can be... found elsewhere wink-wink, in good quality. We watch some older stuff, Breaking Bad, Person of Interest, some non-English stuff. Same with music. Let the dust settle and watch the good shows 2-3 years after. You also get the benefit of ignoring ones that get canceled (OA anyone).
YMMV I guess.
It's hyperbole like this that breaks the illusion for the post. I'm not an editor, but if you're trying to make a valid point you need one man. Stinkeroo.
If you don't think this entire post is hyperbole, you can at least see that it's yet another blogspam ad for MiSTer, right?
> I long for the days of driving through the night with AM radio, where at least the ads were interesting.
AM radio sucked.
Right? Also it still exists and can be listened to. The ads were interesting? What?
I don't even know what the ads are on the podcasts I listen to because I can skip them instantly
A million ways to complain about the state of technology, but this ain't it.
It's ironic that we've come full circle here. This is generally what AI does - nothing that isn't prompted, and yet still part of the end and nothing like the beginning of the internet
This blog post is part of what you are complaining about.
This is theatre. Pure theatre.
This one bugs me a lot. The whole "YouTuber voice" or TikTok influencer schlock prose.
Oh, I can. The next version of Android won't run on my current phone, and the official FLIR ONE app that drives the plug-in IR camera that I use to hunt for cold spots in my house for better insulation decided it would uninstall itself because they won't support "old" Android--I mean, they won't support the Android they already support.
So my phone just existing for too long has caused the software to commit suicide, making another piece of hardware I paid good money for not work anymore.
That's not so much a reason to "upgrade" as throw good money after bad money by buying a phone that I don't need to get an OS I don't want.
I mean, they could have just left the goddamn app alone. But they didn't.
This one drives me mad. I don't directly interact with the Music app on my phone very often so it feels like I have to dismiss that ad every damned time.
But I'll post about it on the network
Ali Express is not mandatory. A game console is not necessary. Whining about the network ON THE NETWORK is most certainly not a necessity. Just act like an adult and drop the goddamned phone.
This isn’t a gotcha. It’s a problem that presents itself with a solution and the author seems utterly uninterested in taking it. This is complaining for the sake of complaining.