People love to smugly suggest this useless advice like there aren’t literal public services from governments around the world that are being tied to these platforms, let alone the many private companies which gate access to their goods and services behind apps on proprietary devices.
To say nothing of the fact that well-adjusted humans need to communicate with friends and family, and many times that also practically requires being on these platforms as well.
Someone has to be the stick in the mud, right? I personally enjoy being that guy that doesn’t have a smartphone and causing problems in every government office / institution that assumes everyone has a smartphone, it’s like I’m a pioneer on the frontier :)
E-stim addicts will rationalize their slavery to a small rock in their pocket and sing grand songs about how it’s a curse but they need it. Like all addicts, they are not capable of rationally assessing the utility of the dependence object, and they’ll start carting out all sorts of silly things and gesturing vaguely “See this washing machine? Yep, it needs the rock, that’s why I keep my rock on me and charged at all times”
Reality is that you are the one paying the price, you will spend 45 minutes extra at the office when you could have spent it with your family or friends or playing soccer.
Time is the most precious thing in life, you’ll never be able to buy it back so you may want to reconsider long-term.
This also applies to protesting, activism, politics... It's not that you're wrong, it is in fact time that you could've spent playing soccer. But if everyone just turned their back and played soccer, the world would be a much darker place
Pretty sure I'm getting >10x returns on my time for the minor inconveniences I suffer, most people sacrifice a double digit percent of their time on Earth to the device in their pocket.
You don't have to obey, but not doing so I think definitely puts you into most people's "not well-adjusted" camp... whether you think that's a good thing or not is a different issue I suppose. Lots of people in history who ended up being right were treated similarly...
And I really meant to write "not seen as well-adjusted" above... wasn't trying to say that anyone actually is or not.
I know you think it's rude, my apologies and I wasn't trying to be... just pointing out that people are still going to think it's weird and "not normal" to go to such "extremes" that most people don't, no matter how right they are.
I actually don't think this is true. I think a lot of folks who are (understandably) angry at the Big AI companies want people not to want AI in Firefox. Which is a slightly different problem. https://www.anildash.com/2025/11/14/wanting-not-to-want-ai/
There's more than enough critical mass on other platforms that there's no excuse for them to still be on X, and it's a shame they stay there. Journalists would go to (for example) Bluesky if it were the only place they could get AOC dunking on the tycoons that they're obsessed with covering every utterance from.
Also, to be clear, I’m mostly goofing about it CLIs, and — as I mentioned in the piece — I use one every day. But yes, there are four or five billion internet users who don’t and never will. And CLIs are a poor user interface for 99+% of the tasks that people accomplish on computing devices, or with browsers, which is pertinent for the point I was making.
If I’d anticipated breaching containment and heading towards the orange site, I may not have risked the combination of humor and anything that’s not completely literal in its language. Alas.
Yeah, I think there are profound security issues, but I think many folks dug into the prompt injection nightmare scenarios with the first round of “AI browsers”, so I didn’t belabor that here; I wanted to focus on what I felt was less covered.
I was using the phrase in the vernacular sense; I’ve worked on genuine open standards and know the difference. I don’t think it matters that much to use the phrase in this way in an obviously casual piece on my personal blog, as opposed to a more formal assessment of a technology.
I’m furious about it, I just made a joke in passing because this piece isn’t about that. As it turns out, when I write about the threat to democracy, HN doesn’t actually let the link survive. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42607135
> I just made a joke in passing because this piece isn’t about that.
I get that and maybe it's just me but it really fell flat. The world is on fire and it's reasonable to take a break from writing about that sad reality but in that case, I'd rather the writing not mention it at all instead of making me think about the horrorshow but then making light of it.
Your article about Procurement Capture is spot on.
I get it, we’re all sort of running into the brutality of the descent into authoritarianism at different times and in different ways all the time, we’ll be out of sync with our respective senses of whether we can process it as grief or absurdity or anger or fatigue or whatever at different times. I don’t fault anybody for feeling my tone is off if they’re not in the same mindset at the point when they’re reading.
HN can't fit everyone's writing about 'the threat to democracy', beside the fact it's not really HNs remit. DOGE was still the most discussed topic on HN in the weeks after its establishment. The idea that HN didn't 'let you' is pretty spurious and (however understandably) self-absorbed.
Phew, after skimming through your very lengthy article full of sentences starting with "I", it's quite hard to infer what were you trying to say, honestly. People who jump on any hype-wagon, because they see a personal opportunity are bad. People who try to make up some half-assed justification, after it all goes down in flames are even worse. People who do all of that, plus sprinkle in some bullshit altruism into their explanation of the dumpster fire (like trying to help artists keep control over their work) are absolute hell. Like said, hard pass on whatever you and your ilk have to say.
Not sure how many national magazines you’ve written for, but it is in fact fairly standard practice to write first-person essays in the first person. You did make up a whole bunch of people you don’t like in your example there, but literally none of them nap to what I did here, so I’m not sure what your enumerating except your lack of comprehension of the situation here. Hope that helps.
My man, if I ever pushed or worked on something as pointless as NFTs, I'd be careful to keep my mouth shut and not imply it's others who have a "lack of comprehension". So you somehow got a clueless editor at a "national magazine" to publish your opinion piece (which does not actually translate into "writing for"), good for you and your ego! Only that this fact is completely irrelevant to the main issue at hand - promoting worthless tech either out of pure incompetence, or desire for profit or both. I am not sure which is worse.
To say nothing of the fact that well-adjusted humans need to communicate with friends and family, and many times that also practically requires being on these platforms as well.
reply