See also the 2019 book by Cal Newport, "Digital Minimalism": https://calnewport.com/my-new-book-digital-minimalism/
> I propose a philosophy of technology use called digital minimalism in which you radically reduce the time you spend staring at screens, focusing on a small number of digital activities that strongly support things you deeply value, and then happily ignoring the rest.
[dead]
> ...used some kind of semantic search to show the user a search result from the local database immediately, and then followed that up with a very small LLM writing a text answer. This gives actually-good answers in a very reasonable timeframe
I have tried this very same thing on https://grimoire.bio. Large corpus of biological knowledge with detailed visualizations that are shown immediately upon searching, but adding LLM answer when missing/needed.
> Now, in fairness to X and Elon and its hard-working employees, the Adolf Hitler fandom does seem to have greatly wound down in the one and a half years since then. I suspect part of this is because such movements inevitably burn out once people realize how immoral and stupid they are. But another part is undoubtedly genuine improvements in how The Algorithm™ works.
> Click on the tweet and look around its quotes and responses, the same way that someone would morbidly stare at a car accident.
Twitter gets money from ads. They can sell more ads for more money when they can demonstrate eyeballs and eyeball time. Therefore, they're incentivized to keep your eyeballs on the app for as long as possible. If that means putting car accidents in front of you, that's what it'll do!
I strongly believe that social media is basically a lost cause for this and a few other reasons. I tried out Mastodon and Bluesky, but people there don't seem to actually be interested in conversation, and there's physical limitations that prevent meaningful conversation anyway in the form of character limits. ~200 characters is simply not enough space for anything meaningful to be conveyed, so the platform selects for snippy clapbacks and pithy virtue signalling.
I'm also unconvinced there's anything of value to be had from these platforms, maybe including HN. I seem to be hearing about the new hotness in the AI space for example by just regularly attending coworking events. I guess if everyone stopped using Twitter, that would stop being the case. Or maybe we'd go back to RSS...
Notably absent: AI minimalism.
I think that's telling. If you're reducing digital human interaction on social media (which yes, has its share of problems) but replacing it with "social" interaction with AI, that's not minimalism. You're replacing one vice with an even worse one and coping about it.
Is AI a worse vice than social media?
> if you spent a lot of time on X you will likely remember a particular one: everyone seemed to be suddenly becoming fans of Adolf Hitler... I did not leave X the platform, but I did leave X the interface
You know, it really is entirely optional to hang out at the Nazi bar.
> A phone connected to cell is an always-on tracking device
A phone connected to wifi is also an always-on tracking device. You can't really escape this without removing the "phone" part of the equation
I pretty much stopped reading at the justification for hanging around on X. Lots of people are still there! But at least own it. "I implicitly support the owner of the Nazi bar as long as he tells most of the Nazis to stay away from me" isn't a moral stand I'd be comfortable committing to on paper, digitally, or otherwise.
Unfortunately the network prison keeps people at the Nazi bar. Mandatory Interoperability is the only solution here, which depends on the government, which depends on Nov 11 folks.
I mean, the rest of us just stopped going there. The interesting tech discussions long since left twitter, and if you are jonesing for a fix there is always bluesky or mastodon
In what way will your life change if you never access twitter again?
You know, there’s a world out there beyond the prison. It has no locks and no fences. You can just choose to go outside, right now; go for a hike, see some trees, watch a bird. There is nothing stopping you from never visiting the prison or the bar ever again.
I used to go to that bar a lot. When it became clear it was becoming a Nazi bar, and the owner saw that as a feature, not a bug, I stopped. Describing it as a network prison seems to imply that staying there isn't just a choice like anything else. Yes, it's a choice with consequences, potentially very negative ones, but these things often are. If it were always easier to be moral than amoral, we wouldn't be in this mess.