I have been offline for a week, hurry up I need to share my experience online!
Writing about stuff and entertaining parasocial relationships is his job, it's not exactly weird that he wrote a post about his holiday trip.
Why I Disappeared – My week with minimal internet in a remote island chain
91–100 of 176 posts
Re: Why I Disappeared – My week with minimal internet in a remote island chain
#92Electronic devices are very effective distraction tools, especially phones. Companies and apps leverage our psychology and biology to get our attention, but we can take control of what we interact with—and if we remove the hooks, they won't be able to exploit them anymore. What could help is taking control of how devices interact with us, rather than letting other people control that. This includes deciding which app…
step 1: disable notifications and I mean ALL notifications - learn how to process important / timely events without reminders
Re: Why I Disappeared – My week with minimal internet in a remote island chain
#93The article doesn't deliver on the headline of why the author disappeared. At no point is the motivation for going to the Galapagos disclosed.
Motivation... it's a cool place for a holiday? See some endemic wildlife?
Re: Why I Disappeared – My week with minimal internet in a remote island chain
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
how do you killfile HN users?
I use personal software: https://overmod.org/ If I'm being entirely honest I made it in a very 'scratch-my-own-itch' way so you're better off just writing it yourself. Example idiosyncratic choices I went with: all lists are public, allow subscribing to other people's lists, no login required for lists, only Google Chrome support. I doubt anyone else shares those preferences.
If you add a LICENSE or CONTRIBUTORS file, I'd be tempted to fork or contribute.
( You're perfectly okay to not want either of those things, of course. )
Re: Why I Disappeared – My week with minimal internet in a remote island chain
#95Escaping the internet on a luxury trip doesn’t disprove political conflict… it just shows how privilege can opt out of reality and sell the experience as clickbaity insight.
can a poor person not disconnect in the same way? I think plenty already do without meaning too, lots of tech-illiterate truck drivers and construction workers with flip phones.
Poor people suffer from political conflict more directly, enduring the abysmal policies coming from the top in a very concrete way.
Re: Why I Disappeared – My week with minimal internet in a remote island chain
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't that exactly what privilege is though? A measure of a person's ability to be part of that self-selected pool, and to shield yourself from issues that affect other people?
Googling it, looks like the trip costs around $6.5k for 2 people for a week. Expensive, but not out of reach for most Americans. I mean we're on HN... if anything we're more likely to be in a wealthy bubble here. On average. There's plenty outside Silicon Valley but this place is a bubble too.
The US doesn't mandate any vacation or sick leave days, so a huge chunk of the population can't even get a week off work, much less afford $4k per person.
Re: Why I Disappeared – My week with minimal internet in a remote island chain
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
The price of entry is actually just being born in the country (or at least that's all that's required in most democracies). You personally might have the expectation that when you vote, you should be informed about what you're voting on/for - but that is entirely optional. edit: I'd love to hear about some of your proposed solutions to solving this problem ;)
Increase education funding, mandate a couple of levels of free choice liberal arts/philosophy type courses to ensure people have to expand their thinking a little, focus on critical thinking and media analysis skills in primary and secondary education - not as the main focus but certainly as important, civic building classes. News media gets harsh anti-monopoly rules: no more billionaires owning every station in ever…
Personally I'm all for breaking up the media conglomerates. Especially the news. There is a tremendous amount of group-think from professional elites who all goto the same universities and then go work in the same newsrooms. When combined with endless M&A it creates insular monoculture with low tolerance for opposing views in most of these news outlets.
> At an international scale spin off an entity like the Federal Reserve which would be the Federal International Reporting Bureau with some iron clad rules about funding changes and the sole mission to baseline the availability of boots-on-the-ground international journalism
That sounds great in theory, but given the recent scandals at the BBC and uncovering of systematic bias there we can see how fragile such institutions can be. Even without M&A driving it the BBC has become a primarily leftist monoculture.
> Increase education funding, mandate a couple of levels of free choice liberal arts/philosophy type courses to ensure people have to expand their thinking a little
Sounds great, but also prone to systemic bias. Universities in general have become echo chambers in liberal arts departments.
Perhaps combine that with options for doing national service of some sort that would balance out education. Afterall, classroom learning only gives one aspect of life and experience. Often just exposing people to new places and environments broadens their outlooks.
Re: Why I Disappeared – My week with minimal internet in a remote island chain
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Googling it, looks like the trip costs around $6.5k for 2 people for a week. Expensive, but not out of reach for most Americans. I mean we're on HN... if anything we're more likely to be in a wealthy bubble here. On average. There's plenty outside Silicon Valley but this place is a bubble too.
The US doesn't mandate any vacation or sick leave days, so a huge chunk of the population can't even get a week off work, much less afford $4k per person.
I would imagine the set of people who would spend $4K per person on a week in the Galapagos does not contain very many people who don’t have 3 weeks of vacation per year (or are retired).
Re: Why I Disappeared – My week with minimal internet in a remote island chain
#99I could perfectly survive with gopher://magical.fish, IRC, Mosh, and https://lite.cnn.com and https://text.npr.org at 2.7KBPS speeds.
IRC -> Bitlbee.org public servers -> XMPP and more
gopher://magical.fish -> huge gopher portal. Gopher://sdf.org and a few more than proxies to Gutenberg and the like.
Mosh -> decent SSH speeds.
For fora and asynchronous chats, Usenet and Fido/DoveNet.
Music? Podcasts? Download these before, and store them. Also, books and phlog posts are far lighter and you can seek around freely, and you can read stories in a much faster way.
And, if any, tons of stations still have short wave channels, both in English and in Spanish.
Re: Why I Disappeared – My week with minimal internet in a remote island chain
#100Escaping the internet on a luxury trip doesn’t disprove political conflict… it just shows how privilege can opt out of reality and sell the experience as clickbaity insight.
It's lame how a timeless Buddhist principle is derided as "privilege" by contemporary leftists. So closed minded and presumptuous towards something so effective and universally applicable.
My personal observation is that those with the least engage in this practice the most, partly because they don't have the bandwidth to bother. It's the middle and upper-middle class who are the terminally online cynics.