i think anyone who feels dispossessed from the advance of technology should rekindle that spirit of hands-on adventure by looking at clay pots at the museum.
the souls of a thousand hours sit there behind glass and valued for their richness and simplicity, against all odds, and people to this day carry on those traditions to improve the art.
did the soul of pottery die with the industrial revolution? will your hand code? it won’t be for everyone, but it’s there for you.
find a book by Soetsu Yanagi on the subject of “min gei” and it will help you.
Anecdotally and somewhat related: as blade fighting was common in those days, Chinese surgeons (pre-cultural revolution) would allegedly wrap severed tendons with the leaves of some herb to some effect. Not sure if it was bletilla striata.
so as to not hold the liability bag, devs will publish the majority of their apps as 18+ (we're back to the 2000s with porn banner ads everywhere), and children will ask their parents to use their computer (orly owl).
funny. i actually woke up this morning fairly early and bustling alive with ideas (oh you know, nonsense 5am ones like what i should do if the petrodollar collapses... trade eggs and make a fiat cryptocurrency internal to my company (not subject to oversight) based on favors? wax tokens melted after favors met... something or another.
and i noted that urge to check my phone to validate those (later midday: embarrassing) ideas. it occurred to me then that it's precisely that urge to check the phone that usually kills them. and if it isn't that, it's the missed smses and emails and the latest gripe on hn. i wondered how many good ideas were strangled with the mundanity/viciousness (depending on your algorithm) of this device
"is it really so bad to sit alone with my thoughts, without having an immediate answer to put them to rest?"
> QR codes:
haha agreed. those QR codes coincide with mandatory post covid tip rate and inflated prices; whenever I tip it's 15-18% cash, and direct to waiter. i don't eat at places that invest in insta (food for the eyes) instead of real food.
> keys + mfa:
this one is a tricky one for me. thinking to go do web-only mfa fwiw and go full RMS with just a laptop and a hotspot. does he even use a hotspot? haha. as far as SMS MFA goes... maybe tailscale out an adb session to your real cellphone at home. feels brittle, but so is sms mfa. edit: actually i'll just forward SMS to myself via e-mail; this is what your financial advisor does, since SMS is heavily regulated in fintech
> nav:
yeah when smartphones first came out i just hated every design aspect about them (stupidly fragile screens at the time), but the most compelling reason to switch at the time was navigation. i don't mind printing mapquest again or just using a dedicated gps.
it's the value prop of having "all the world's knowledge at your fingertips" versus:
stupid obsoletion practices + lithium mining, corpogovernment surveillance + tracking, eroding mental health, porn, gacha games, cellphone thumb + turtle neck, doom scrolling + time wasted, enshittified content, the reverse flynn-effect, infuriating typing ux on both ios and android, and people having near constant access to you at all times (remember when it was rude to call past 8p?)
does this thing really make you happy?
that i think it's time to just leave your phone at home...like in ye olde days with your landline and i'm an app developer. (you should keep the phone and gps on and at least pretend that you're a normie).
anyone in construction really like their ruggedized SIP phone and can recommend a good voip system (ie they trust their voip provider) with e2e encryption that I can connect a wifi 6 mobile router to? someone a few months ago on hn mentioned the mudi v2 and sim swapping with https://github.com/srlabs/blue-merle
when you couch it as a left vs right instead of a top vs down problem you will lock yourself (and your immediate circle) up in the hardline media items the people who lobby both sides will control.
as disclosure: i am socially liberal and fiscally conservative except in matters relating to education, which i believe should be free (and tuition rate controlled). never voted for trump, never will. wanted to write in bernie for the first pass until he dropped, then threw for the queen of england. i didn't vote in the last election. i consider ice to be an illegal and fascist arm of too large a state.
the most arresting argument i've heard a leftist say (which i agree with) is: there is a distribution of wealth at which a free market fails and we are long past that, especially given our failure to bust monopolies and enforce antitrust law.
that enables entities who lobby both sides of the policy spectrum to position us against each other. epstein played this well: how else do you get neoconservatives bubbling out of 4chan as an answer to thundercat tumblr kids? it's all divide-and-conquer (and over the most inane issues).
now, tell me: do you want to support eurasia or oceania? or do you want to put the puppeteers in jail?
This is such a fucking stupid argument because the "right" explicitly aligns itself with the 0.01%. If they are cheerleading it and voting for it and celebrating it, what the fuck makes you think they are on the side of the 99%. It's counterfactual. There is no evidence of it. Look at their support for Trump for fucks sake. He has made over $3B from his presidency ripping people off, and they fucking love him for it. They are on his side, not ours! Again. Look at how they consistently vote before pretending they are any sort of ally.
you flip on the news and you see the fat red faced wal-mart alcoholics raving about the latest ice raid and iran bombing. it's a pretty disgusting thing, isn't it? but count that number of people you see on the news and compare it to the number represented by 49.81 percent of people who are duped into leaning right in a two party system. then what you see on the news is an insipid and vocal minority by comparison.
they seem loud because they were born and raised in a 4chan cesspool, and relative to our ears (as we see them online), the 'enemies' are everywhere (ie overrepresented by our algorithms, since our outrage makes them money).
meanwhile both parties (in various states and layers of government) have made ranked voting either illegal or impossible to implement.
both parties (as well throughout the world) have pushed for greater government surveillance technologies and laws.
both parties have gone to the island, shot kids in sarajevo, staged military coups throughout the world, destroyed democracies, left migrant children starving at night in detention centers, sleeping on mattresses thrown into the mud. you think biden was blameless in that? i've seen those kids.
i hear you, and i am just as angry. but remember that there are a variety of reasons why people vote in the way that they do. they may come to regret those decisions when they send their kids to war, and perhaps that is some apt and just punishment.
however, don't fall into the trap of mistaking those people in your relative socioeconomic group from having entirely different needs and wants as yourself and your family.
if you vilify them, you will have aided and abetted in our dividing. the people needing to be put in jail are outliers in our system by far. they corrupt the islands, stage sarajevos, trade diamonds in war torn villages, and laugh their way to the bank while we squabble with ourselves as to 'whodunnit'. don't fall for it.
> Why as an adult you would play Pokemon over SMT is something I can't get
bro are you serious? smt is the definition of painful in terms of time sunk and the newer pokemon games have so many guard rails; i can mindlessly blast through the whole story and craft a quick crew to beat down my wife and friends and just be done ;p
now granted, would I rather play (and 100 percent complete) any SMT game? yes. how do adults do it? i watched my friend who's an RN on hospital hours + has three kids blast through cyberpunk and the answer is pretty simple: sleep is for the weak.
my wife and i were just musing to ourselves this morning about whether it was strange that the franchise hasn't died yet.
that conversation went somewhere along the lines of: "surely kids aren't interested in what their parents were/are interested in" (oh didn't we hate our parents' style) -- and then I remembered that I really wanted to see Speed Racer, which was what my dad was into in the late sixties. i still thought that the animation was about as impressive as pokemon at the time (funny how they animated more frames than one punch man these days!!!)
i think kids these days complain that their fat old parents are wearing (ostensibly 'millennial') graphic tees in public so there is plenty of generational rejection. but it's really weird how the internet hasn't developed more obvious generational 'coding' (except in language), and hasn't rejected things like pokemon entirely.
or is it pretty easy to code us? lol
their rejection of us aside (which is an evolutionary and biological thing) i wonder if our parents felt 'as connected' to us generationally speaking as we 'feel' we are to the next (socioeconomically and socio-digitally)?
the souls of a thousand hours sit there behind glass and valued for their richness and simplicity, against all odds, and people to this day carry on those traditions to improve the art.
did the soul of pottery die with the industrial revolution? will your hand code? it won’t be for everyone, but it’s there for you.
find a book by Soetsu Yanagi on the subject of “min gei” and it will help you.
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