There was an old YouTube video of a young guy standing around somewhere in East Asia, placards in hand, recording himself showing messages on those placards about why you should quit social media, set to Marching The Hate Machines.
It had a placard in it saying something like "You don't have 100 friends. You have like 4. And that's OK."
The more I'm getting older, the truer this has become. There is something extremely zen-like about letting the past trail away like the wake of a ship, as Watts said.
In an ideal world, those people were dear to me, and me to them, and we would all stay in touch and be one big happy family, n'importe the distance. But it takes plenty out of me just to be there for those that matter most. And for them, putting up with my quirks is burdensome but not an unscalable wall. As it is for me with their quirks in reverse.
I'm in Europe, with a bunch of non-geeky friends, coming from all walks of life who have Signal installed.
As a sibling comment to yours stated, the hardest decision was deciding to stop using Meta.
I have a militant "let the leaves fall where they may" attitude towards stopping relationships with companies I detest (Microsoft, Amazon, Meta...) It all always works out fine.
I think the point is rather what percentage of people will continue to need to have a phone that is Apple or Google, due to death by a million decisions like these.
You might be being a tad uncharitable to the GP. Competition isn't an inherently bad thing. Many engineering endeavours (and engineers) have been made better by the crucible of competition. The first space race, Formula 1, even the competition between the different experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, for example.
Easy answer to your last point: Work machine and Non-work machine. If I'm working for a company and the company needs MS Office, they will give me a machine with MS Office. I will treat that machine like a radioactive zone. Full Hazmat suit. Not a shred of personal interaction with that machine. It exists only to do work on and that's that. The company can take care of keeping it up to date, and the company's IT department can do the bending over the table on my behest as MS approaches with dildos marked "Copilot" or "Recall" or "Cortana" or "React Native Start Menu" or "OneDrive" or whatever.
Meanwhile, my personal machine continues to be Linux.
This is what I'm doing at my work now. I'm lucky enough to have two computers, a desktop PC that runs Linux, and a laptop with Windows 11. I do not use that laptop unless I have to deal with xlsx, pptx or docx files. Life is so much better.
I've recently had to migrate over to Python from Matlab. Pandas has been doing my head in. The syntax is so unintuitive. In Matlab, everything begins with a `for` loop. Inelegant and slow, yes, but easy to reason about. Easy to see the scope and domain of the problem, to visualise the data wrangling.
Pandas insist you never use a for loop. So, I feel guilty if I ever need a throwaway variable on the way to creating a new column. Sometimes methods are attached to objects, other times they aren't. And if you need to use a function that isn't vectorised, you've got to do df.apply anyway. You have to remember to change the 'axis' too. Plotting is another thing that I can't get my head around. Am I supposed to use Pandas' helpers like df.plot() all the time? Or ditch it and use the low level matplotlib directly? What is idiomatic? I cannot find answers to much of it, even with ChatGPT. Worse, I can't seem to create a mental model of what Pandas expects me to do in a given situation.
Pandas has disabused me of the notion that Python syntax is self-explanatory and executable-pseudocode. I find it terrible to look at. Matlab was infinitely more enjoyable.
I don't care, simple as that. I'm also in an adversarial relationship with LTT, and with Google.
I realised over the last years that my weariness with the internet was born mostly out of Youtube and Reddit. Reddit I've successfully cut out of my life, Youtube is more difficult to do because much of modern culture happens there. But I've drawn the line at the worst offenders. In tech, people like Dave2D and Marques Brownlee have managed to avoid having stupid thumbnails, so I'd rather watch them. Thereafter, I have a CalmYoutubers.md file that has the (few) channels that I find are not idiotic, so I stick to them.
There are children and there are adults. Children have more free time. Children watch more YouTube than adults. So LTT's audience is probably more children too.
Children are attracted to soy-boy suprised pikachu face on clickbait thumbnails. CHLIDREN are ATTRACTED to EVERY second WORD being IN all CAPS!!! They like the three exclamation marks. They like flashy text on MrWhoseTheBoss videos which repeat the same thing the fucking guy is talking but just with flashy text on screen. They like the whizz-bang animations and ADHD addled three-second shots. They like the Mr. Beastification of Youtube.
I'm not a child. I'm too old and weary for that. LTT wants to do it, he can. Godspeed, and may his next twenty million subscribers fill the hole in his pocket and his soul that the first twenty million couldn't. I just ain't gonna be watching.
I switched myself to Arch about 4 years ago now, with Sway. So fucking amazing. Everything is at my fingertips. Config files are easy to understand. AUR is a massive productivity boost.
As I got more comfortable with Linux, I decided to change things up even at the office. I switched to RHEL on my work PC. Consequently, moved from Matlab to Python. I even got my girlfriend to switch to Linux Mint and Graphene OS. The other day, she said it was joyous to be able to hit the start menu, type "Print" and have "Printer" show up. No drama. She has also discovered a love for the command line, being able to type "pdfunite blah blah" and have her PDFs combined into one etc.
Linux in 2025 is world-class, I have zero regrets.
You'd be surprised. I have to run RHEL at work, with Gnome. No Albert, no Wofi, no Rofi. Fuck all in the repositories. For months I missed typing Alt + Space, typing filename, hitting enter and having it open.
One evening with Claude. Done. Obviously it's not perfect, but man what an amazing thing to be able to do. I'm not even a software developer. LLMs are the new Excel.
Whoa. This looks very interesting. Does it support maths? Are the images stored locally? Can fonts and typography be changed? How does it differ from your open-source version which looks similar?
Yes. I'm over the hatred for Electron too. Programmers have few options if they want cross-platform compatibility without Electron. What else are they going to use? QT? Please, give me a break. Some angelic developers like the KeepassXC guys still use QT, but that is a tough road to go down on. For the rest of them, Electron Or Bust I'm afraid.
Highly recommended. What you will find is that the title does the book justice. The top executives at Facebook aren't so much cartoonishly evil but rather hopelessly inept for the job at hand. They have no idea what they are doing, and little concern by way of the consequences of their actions, or their outsized impacts on individuals and the world in general.
Thank you ever so much for this recommendation. I'm already through half of his upskilling document. It is as if he wrote the book exactly for me. I've been studying first thing in the morning off and on for a while now, and I'm happy to find that he advocates for that. Other than that, his focus on a) maths, b) coding and, c) domain expertise fit in line with where I want to head. I'm also happy to see that he has written much on his blog that I could dig into later.
It had a placard in it saying something like "You don't have 100 friends. You have like 4. And that's OK."
The more I'm getting older, the truer this has become. There is something extremely zen-like about letting the past trail away like the wake of a ship, as Watts said.
In an ideal world, those people were dear to me, and me to them, and we would all stay in touch and be one big happy family, n'importe the distance. But it takes plenty out of me just to be there for those that matter most. And for them, putting up with my quirks is burdensome but not an unscalable wall. As it is for me with their quirks in reverse.