Apple is the only company I can imagine doing this. They're really the only remaining PC company where a PC is defined as a computer designed to serve and assist its customer/user instead of treat the customer as the product.
iOS 15 Humane
351–360 of 496 posts
Re: iOS 15 Humane
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the tone, I believe they are intentionally trolling for reactions. It is probably best not to feed them.
It's called democratic discussion, but sure, go ahead, call me a troll. If that's your only argument, I think you've effectively helped in explaining what a limited world view is with a very practical example.
[deleted]
Re: iOS 15 Humane
#353I've honestly grown to hate my iPhone.
It hit me during a particularly stressful work period about a year ago that this device doesn't bring any happiness to my life and only brings anxiety, stress and saps my energy like a parasite.
Once that stressful period was over the feeling didn't go away though and now I can't even get rid of it because all my friends use apps to communicate rather than SMS so it's either I allow this parasite in my life or I just go disconnect almost completely.
and I don't think what I'm saying is ridiculous and I think Apple knows its bad otherwise they wouldn't be creating things like screentime tracking and focus modes.
Re: iOS 15 Humane
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also had to do the same. The method of disabling it, while not immediately obvious, didn't seem intentionally user-hostile. However, the idea of modifying any part of a user's desktop without their explicit input is troubling to say the least.
Microsoft's recent history with 'forced UI additions' of this sort would imply it is indeed intentionally user-hostile.
Exactly why more people should switch to Linux on their desktops/laptops.
> but Linux sucks, it's ugly, it's broken, it doesn't work, blah blah blah!
The amount of time people spend complaining about the evil shit their monopolist is doing to them would be better spent learning how to use Linux. It's not that hard.
A farmer isn't going to make changes to their business model because the cattle is complaining. Microsoft is going to keep doing what they're doing until the government steps in (which is unlikely to happen any time soon). Same goes for Apple, Amazon, Google, and all these companies that are immune to competitive forces.
Re: iOS 15 Humane
#355The article wants Apple to save us from mindless browsing, but I see mindless browsing as unavoidable. Not because of some technical or legal thing, but because mindless browsing is a good thing. We need it. Mindless browsing is like a walk through the woods, just looking for what is happening, navigating a huge amount of information that is hardly important at the moment – oh, the cherry tree is blooming – but could…
Mindless browsing is nothing like walking randomly in the woods or on the beach, communing with nature. One thing saps our humanity and the other enhances it.
My argument is that we need some kind of movement, some kind of change that is happening outside of us. It feels great to sit in the backyard and watch the chicken quarrel, but who has chickens anymore? It can be enjoyable to sit in a cafe at the town square and just witness life happening around you, but most town squares are losing this community side.
Since the immediate 'outside' – my home and office – mostly lacks this tiny uninterrupted movements that I describe, this continuous stream of life happening, I begin to feel isolated and turn to the screens around me. They provide a similar feeling of being connected to life, even if much less fulfilling.
Sure, I could work on changing the social life of my city, reviving the town square and planting gardens, but here, on a hacker news site, I like to dream about some technological solution that might fulfill the need of seeing myself embedded in a perpetual movement on life.
Re: iOS 15 Humane
#356The article wants Apple to save us from mindless browsing, but I see mindless browsing as unavoidable. Not because of some technical or legal thing, but because mindless browsing is a good thing. We need it. Mindless browsing is like a walk through the woods, just looking for what is happening, navigating a huge amount of information that is hardly important at the moment – oh, the cherry tree is blooming – but could…
It's well past midnight, I've been interacting with apps designed to maximize 'user engagement' since 8 PM. I don't have coherent thoughts, I'm opening irrelevant tabs habitually. This is not healthy. I have a problem. That problem is mindless browsing, and it feels engineered. Not saying you're wrong, just that your ideas don't work for me.
A trick that helped me was to put time limits on my apps. Then I set the access code to a random number and wrote that number down and put the paper in an inconvenient spot (eg. My basement cellar).
The result is there is just enough friction that I don’t bother going to get the number. But if ever I need access I can alway go get it.
Re: iOS 15 Humane
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
Librem 5 and Pinephone both allow deep tinkering without privacy problems.
That is a disingenuous comparison though. Compare X86 market share when Linus started coding Linux and Librem/Pinephone market share today. The difference is that to have a snowball's chance in hell to grow and spread you need to be able to thinker and invent on the hardware most people use .
I'm not suggesting that we don't need more freedom for hardware most people use. I just say that if you want to support freedom, consider abandoning Apple and choosing other phones.
Re: iOS 15 Humane
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's well past midnight, I've been interacting with apps designed to maximize 'user engagement' since 8 PM. I don't have coherent thoughts, I'm opening irrelevant tabs habitually. This is not healthy. I have a problem. That problem is mindless browsing, and it feels engineered. Not saying you're wrong, just that your ideas don't work for me.
I did the same thing for years, mindlessly browsing well past a sane hour. What changed is I started going to bed early and getting up early, before the sun rises. I still browse mindlessly on occasion, but my after-coffee morning browsing is a lot more directed than my drowsy evening browsing.
Another solution is no phones (chargers) in the bedroom. Have your "charging station" in the living room
Re: iOS 15 Humane
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s because the internet is no longer a walk through the woods. It’s now a stumble through a confusing poorly-lit casino.
Well said. 100% agreement. Last year, I found myself in an unusually unhappy place. Partly COVID lockdowns, partly changes at work, partly politics (US resident). My wife noticed and told me to get off Facebook/Twitter/etc - they were making me visibly agitated. As I weaned myself off those platforms, my happiness and stress levels improved. I'm glad to be (mostly) off the platforms. It's been a massive improvement.…
I outright deleted Facebook and Twitter (or at least, my established profiles on 'em, to the best of my ability). Also ditched Instagram while I was at it, as I felt like I 'should' post stuff to it, not because the things I saw there were bothering me.
I made a twitter account specifically to not have any friends and not do anything, and treat it the same way you're treating it.
Same reaction: it's been a massive improvement. I wouldn't go back. Looking at that stuff from the outside now, it feels like a trap. Amazing how they can turn making you miserable, into an addictive behavior.
We are apparently, as a species, more driven by panic than pleasure, and the algorithm optimizes for this.
Re: iOS 15 Humane
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t know. Why can’t we have both? Why can’t we have devices that permit “mucking about” but also when configured appropriately allow us to ignore the low level details and muck about with higher level stuff? They don’t have to be mutually exclusive despite “bt whole home wifi app has detected this is a jailbroken device and for your safety will not run”. It’s my wifi, it’s my phone!
You literally have both, and more. Right now, I have a nearly uncrackable walled-garden iphone on my desk. And a mac laptop running XCode (learning about Metal programming), and at the same time running an Amiga emulator (tinkering with 68k assembly), and a windows gaming laptop next to it, and a breadboard on the floor with a pile of resistors and capacitors and transistors. So what's the problem again?
> You literally have both, and more.
Seriously.
When I was a kid I would have killed to have had easy access to things like Raspberry Pi's, microcontrollers, SGI workstations (which is what the Mac is these days), and a zillion free programming languages.
Instead, while I had full access to the family's PC and could learn C and assembly language programming on it (btw I had to pay for those compilers), and learned all about interrupts and writing to VGA registers, I still couldn't do anything super low-level like muck around with the boot sector because my dad needed it for work, the phone system was so locked down that you'd go to jail for "exploring" it, and I had barely any idea how to get started playing around with logic chips because there was nothing like Sparkfun, Adafruit, Hackaday, etc, and Radio Shack in the mid-90s really wasn't much help.
There is still room for improvement - yes it would be nice if all the tech we used was both hackable and secure - but geeks who want to tinker are living in a land of plenty right now.