wantless · HackerTrans

Gentoo was the primary source of heating for my living quarters back in the early 2000s. My tower was highly constrained on memory, and I was on a relentless quest to pare out any modules or dependencies I wasn't actually using. Performance gains were primarily from being able to stay out of slow HDD swap space memory. I doubt there were any gains once amortizing the compilation times, but I ran my compile batches at night, and they kept me nice and warm.

wantless

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I have begun to recognize a sense of restlessness in myself that prompts me to optimize for information, as you have said, and I think I can begin to name it: anxiety due to withdrawal. It is illuminating to have once been a smoker because the feeling is quite similar. That our tastes have changed is due at least in part to the addiction of information. And a solution, at least in part, is to accept the pain of withdrawal.

It can be exceedingly difficult to distinguish good habits from bad where they involve the necessities and pleasures of life, such as food and information. Bad habits tend to comfort us in the moment but weaken us over time; good habits tend toward opposite. When I am honest with myself, I recognize the majority of my information seeking as quelling some anxious feeling rather than building true knowledge or wisdom, and the majority of the information I sought to be naught but empty distractions in the long term. And I also recognize my backlogs as a series of deaths that I have not accepted: I retain them to grasp onto the passing potentiality of my youth; I hold fast to the mirage of different lives.

wantless

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Site layout can definately be an annoyance browsing in text. More accessible sites will offer a Jump to Content link near the top, which is the case with Wikipedia. In Lynx, hitting the ">" to move down a row of links then right arrow (or corresponding vim motion if configured) brings you adjacent to the article TOC and significantly closer to the article text.

wantless

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This response was written from Lynx within a tmux session: Hacker News remains a notable bastion of simplicity, usability, and accessibility. Lynx is my primary browswer, but precisely because I desire a degree of separation from the "modern" internet. This requires curation. Many sites simply do not work. But this practice gives me space to reconsider what I actually want from the web and what the web wants from me.

wantless

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I offer you sincere gratitude for leaving this heartfelt statement, which resonates so powerfully with me in this very moment of my life.

wantless

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I wish to offer some gentle resistance to the notion that future generations will not miss anything. You can still feel the loss of something even without knowledge of the loss. Too many children are already missing out on the enriching vibrancy of unmediated experience. They feel it as anxiety and depression. Mental health statistics for our youth are disastrous. The adoption of each novel technology that replaces a former way of life involves a loss. This is not to say technology must never be adopted, but there is a trade-off. We should keep in mind what we are losing and what we gain from technology, and use that knowledge to inform the limits of our use.

wantless

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I have used the "Mitsu-Bishi" 9800s (the green painted pencil with gold lettering in this article) for years: all sharpen to perfection. I like HBs, but love the 2Bs, which write as smooth as butter. This is the low tier pencil offering at about 50 cents (US) each. I will never try high-end Unis; I can't afford to habituate myself to luxury with the volume I write.

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