People get comfort and refreshment from all sorts of unhealthy things. People do all sorts of unhealthy things.

No! Why are so many so bad at metaphors and comparisons!

Watching a movie and having an emotional reaction is not the same as believing a fancy auto complete is a real meaningful interactive relationship on par with a boyfriend!

and a few of the worst offenders (Google is one that I know does this) add a random string of characters on the element that serve as a unique identifier that periodically changes and so requires me to readd them to my UBO blocklist.

Does ubo accept css selectors? Css has syntax for “match element that starts with, ends with, or contains, this string”

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Attribute_selectors

Half of US adults can’t read at a 6th grade level. This is haunting.

Some strikingly high percentage can’t complete complicated tasks on a computer (eg: find 3 user email addresses and add them to a spreadsheet).

Reading the manual is good advice but I think some people are just left behind

I would build homes, trains, bus lines, and green power.

And also make sure the water fountains in the park actually work year round.

Yeah I noticed that, too. Not sure why. Using apt on the command line is probably an alternative, at least.

Also switched to Linux (popos) this month. It’s been fine. Games work. Browser works. No complaints, really.

I think most computer users now don’t know that file systems exist

She’s a very selfish person who doesn’t care about other people. She only cares about what benefits her. So when someone says “there’s no material benefit to me” they sound like that kind of asshole.

Also it was a critically acclaimed show, not some obscure media.

That doesn’t logically follow. No more than saying “Building more highways is bad for the environment, ergo the highway administrators benefit from having more cars on the road.” You’re looking at a problem of induced demand and concluding the problem is on the demand-side of the equation.

What? Yes it does. Facebook needs users to generate revenue. With no users, they can’t sell ads or user data. How else do you think they make money? Do you not think making money is a benefit for the owners of facebook?

It’s one node in a massive web. And it’s easy to say “Well, you have to do your part because <insert consumerist morality here>”. But mostly it’s just some random asshole on the internet telling me not to use my telephone because AT&T is run by a richer set of random assholes. There’s no material benefit to me and no collective coordinated action that I’m seriously participating in.

You’re reminding me of Eleanor from the good place. Do you also litter? Refuse to return shopping carts?

I haven’t seen any real evidence to that effect.

Do you accept that facebook is harmful to the world, or would I need to try to prove that? There’s the time they tried to see if they could make people sad by adjusting the feed. (They could)

If you accept that, it’s a small step to “They benefit from having more users on their platform”. More users means more engagement, which means more ads, and advertisers pay more money for those ads. No one’s going to pay big bucks to advertise their stuff to an empty platform. Facebook’s going to have a harder time selling user data and metadata if users aren’t on there.

Now, getting one family to stop using facebook is a drop in the bucket. But every family that leaves makes it easier for the next family to leave.

Those aren’t the only email providers, and using email is less harmful than using Facebook.

email exists and isn’t run by the worst people on earth

Yeah I don’t know about the down votes. I tried to be clear I was talking about a preference and personal experience, but I guess some people took offense.

The last non fiction book I read that was really interesting was “The Ghost Map”. It’s about when people figured out Cholera. That’s kind of technology adjacent.

Yeah, but YouTube isn’t as credible. And if it was, I’d still rather read something than spend twice as long watching half the information. Tastes differ

To me YouTube is an untrustworthy platform owned by one of the worse mega corps. But also I just don’t enjoy video as a medium

I dare say books still exist

The people who make decisions at Youtube clearly do not even use their own website or app and there is no way to give feedback either.

Ed Zitron, famously verbose web blog guy, wrote a post about how he thinks most of these big businesses are run by idiots that are out of touch with both the product and the users.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

It’s simple: they neither know nor care what the customer wants, barely know how their businesses function, barely know what their products do, and barely understand what their workers are doing, meaning that generative AI feels magical, because it does an impression of somebody doing a job, which is an accurate way of describing how most executives and middle managers operate.

This is only me describing my personal taste, but:

Almost all video essays and podcasts I would rather just read. It takes half the time. Include pictures, diagrams, and animations if needed. But I can read much faster and retain much better reading than listening to someone talk. Listening at double speed is faster, but can be uncomfortable.

I can imagine some value in some other niches, like you’re saying, but the amount of slop and trash out there is too high for me, and the companies selling it are the worst.

Every time I see some parasocial YouTuber making That Face I just get irritated.

Sometimes I forget people watch YouTube on purpose. Other than music videos and the rare “how do I do this thing in this game?” I just don’t use it

I feel like an alien sometimes. Reading books like some sort of lost time traveler.