147 karma · joined June 1, 2023
This seems hyperbolic. Given that money doubles in roughly 10 years at a 10% rate of return, if kiddos are 10 years old they get two doublings by 30. To be a millionaire by 30 requires a present value investment of $250k per child.
Consumers nowadays are weak, they refuse to give up convenience in order to vote with their wallets in any way that matters.
Since the Win11 popups started about how my PC wasn't eligible, I no longer use Windows anywhere I'm not forced to (essentially, at work, on a work-provided PC).
I actually ended up disabling watch history all together and I’ve installed an extension (Unhook) that hides the sidebar recommendations, Shorts, and other useless features.
This was actually a big issue in my office leading to work from home being rolled back. The boomers want to be in the office so other people are forced to socialize with them, and they don’t want to be home because many of them seem to resent their spouses.
IMO it’s a terrible trade-off. What they lack is true relationships and friendships, and they're filling the void with idle workplace chitchat for the illusion of connection. I’d rather be at home. I’m getting paid to work, not provide social support for lonely boomers.
Same story with /r/n***ers (allowed to exist on Reddit until 2013), /r/CoonTown (banned in 2015, was literally just all the refugees from the previous sub), /r/FatPeopleHate (2015 ban wave), /r/ConsoomProduct (weird alt-right takeover of randomly named subs, banned in 2020).
Reddit, Inc does not care about this stuff until it attracts them negative attention. Any statements about "addressing hate speech on Reddit" always have and always will be performative reactions.
I learned this lesson in my early 20s. Nearly every entity that you interact with is trying to transact with you, in a way that benefits themselves. Whether that's a legitimate transaction (money exchanged for a product/service exactly as advertised), a misrepresented transaction (the product/service is not as advertised), taking your money for nothing, or simply taking away your time and attention (advertising).
Even before AI, if you were unable to get a good sense of legitimate transactions, you'd lose all your money on misrepresented transactions to scammy used car salesmen, door-to-door salesmen, and whole life insurance salesmen. These parasites and their ilk prey on people who are trusting by nature, and people who will say "yes" to avoid disappointing a stranger. It's unfortunate that the world has come to this, but you need to be untrusting of others' motivations by nature to not be taken advantage of financially.
Media goes on my RAID1 NAS. Whose boot drive is running on a 32GB SSD.
As long as I have enough space to install the programs I use I don’t see the need for more boot drive storage. Network and external storage are cheaper and more convenient.
A couple months ago I also switched from Android to iPhone. My overall perception is Apple isn’t perfect, but definitely does privacy better, and their guidelines for user experience in design avoid some of the more egregious things MS and Google have changed recently.
The average person is fine giving up their data and time in exchange for entertainment and convenience. Free software is good but it comes at the cost of time, you have to learn and be at least semi-competent with a terminal and/or Linux to truly use most FOSS stuff and it’s just beyond the average person. They either don’t have the interest, or don’t have the capability to learn it and for all intents and purposes those are fundamentally equivalent.
Honestly, nothing “bad” has happened to most people as a result of data harvesting. The Equifax breach got a ton of people, including hardcore privacy nerds. There’s just some stuff you can’t turn off to participate in modern society.
I'm effectively always on my network because I use Wireguard to VPN back in to home, so I can easily access my server and RPi dashboards. Though at this point I've whitelisted a few dozen domains that were giving my wife or I issues, and excluded most of her devices because she doesn't want to be on it, so it's pretty hands-off. The only time I have to disable the pihole nowadays is when I'm unsubscribing from an email list and the link is a tracking link. And that's with over 3M domains blocked.
I also excluded most of her devices from any filtering by the pihole because she wants to be able to click the sponsored links and ads on Google. Whatever.
Apple is offering some great value for the money with the M4 chip now, the Mac Mini is $600 and the 13" MacBook Air is $1k.
The real killer is of course the corporate monitoring software and bloated endpoint security suites, we can all point to dozens of coworkers as the reason these exist, and unfortunately as far as I know of there's no corpos that do an "idiot test" to allow people who have demonstrated computer literacy and compliance with corpo security policy to be placed in a less restrictive group.
A Raspberry Pi with an SSD is much snappier than the newest and much more powerful business-grade laptops our employees are issued with all the bloatware on them.
I’m a regular engineer, non-software, my coding knowledge is very basic, I could never be employed even as a junior dev unless I wanted to spend evenings grinding and learning.
Still I was able to set up a NAS and a personal server using Docker. I think a basic and broad intro to programming class like Harvard’s CS50 is all that would be required to learn enough to be able to figure out self-hosting.
Actually Apple seems decent with storing personal information on-device, or at least giving the user options to control it. As shown in my pi-hole, my Apple devices send way less requests to tracking and data harvesting domains compared to Microsoft and Google/Android products.
I did my usual investigation of flip phones and dumb phones; couldn't find one that ran Android or basic apps like Spotify and podcasts that I use every day *and* worked on major US cell carriers. There's some cool E-Ink phones out of China, but AFAIK they don't have full compatibility on US cell networks.
I ended up with an iPhone and I just dumb it down. Black background, installed only like a dozen apps, removed a bunch of the preinstalled ones, aggressively culled notifications.
Actually I've been thinking of removing the web browser from my iPhone. Your post inspired me to do it. Settings --> Screen Time --> Content & Privacy --> Allowed Apps, disable Safari. Let's see how I manage!
So... Raspberry Pis?
The article has on average, about one em dash per paragraph. And “paragraph” is generous given they’re 2-3 sentences in this article.
I read a lot, and I don’t recall any authors I’ve personally read using an em dash so frequently. There would be like 3 per page in the average book if human writers used them like GPT does.