I've slowly pushed away the classic attention manipulating applications -- basically anything that will find new content to keep you engaged. Tiktok feels like the maximalist example, but other similar apps, social media text feeds, and parts of Youtube (though, I've so aggressively tuned Youtube that it has a very limited content base to show me.)
TV isn't for TV's sake; it's for relaxing a little with someone I care about.
I can read longer form news articles and not need to stay abreast of what's happening daily.
I've found that I'll eventually grow bored and annoyed with things meant to steal attention, at which point I'll excise them from my life. It just might take an unfortunate while to get there.
I set foot in a shop for the first time at a hackerspace 11 or 12 years ago and eventually feel deep into machining. I spent huge swaths of my days there, and when I wasn't, I was reading about machining. Books, because there were few Youtubers doing it and the forums are thin. It's not a popular hobby and a lot of the professionals and hobbyists aren't computer savvy.
I focused on it to the detriment of other things. Friends commented last year on how absorbed I became and how much I was absorbing. Puttering around on a computer fell away, since it wasn't that relevant to the hobby. It wasn't necessary to use the aging laptop in my free time; I could read PDFs on my phone or old, used books.
But you're not looking at your phone often, because your hands are dirty. Or busy. Or there's a significant safety concern from lapsed attention. Or when doing related types of metal working, weld spatter might land on a face up phone and take chunks out of the glass. Or maybe a steel chip scratches the screen.
Eventually I drifted away from machining for another hobby, but I've come back to it now that I have space in my garage -- this time with more balance. I'm not out until after midnight on work nights. Instead, I'm up before dawn, working with my hands for an hour or two before work. After work, I spend time on learning things somewhat relevant to my career. On the weekends, I'll spend a few hours each day.
The machining isn't ever useful. I made a nylon washer on my lathe once for a dog harness -- I think that's the only item I've made that's not for the hobby itself. But it's tangible. The projects are incredibly slow, and no undo button means a small mistake can result in hours work thrown in the recycling. I spent maybe eight hours over the past four days making a tiny brass rod (as well as other, failed versions) to repair an older clockwork mechanism. A used replacement would've been relatively cheap on Ebay, but that's never the point.
If (and I mean only if it would be interesting to you, no other reason and no implied 'ought') you wanted, I'm pretty sure that there are people out there who would like to return things like telescope mountings, old focusers, mechanical devices of all kinds to a working state. Over here in the UK, people volunteer at steam engine workshops and even in jewellery workshops to restore things. And they get a supply of interesting items to make...
I don't know if that's a thing here in the states, but I'll keep it in mind! It probably wouldn't be hard to advertise via the local (different) hackerspace.
But I'll probably have to get through my backlog of current tasks and projects before I wanted to take on other peoples'. And I may have literally set up a wiki to track those projects...
One of the secondary awful things about AI is that I have to hear news sources I like listening to complain about it constantly.
This AI hype is frustrating, but it's also frustrating that it dominates conversations with valid points that are identical to the last five times it was talked about.
At this point it's almost more annoying than the AI hype in the first place.
The hype by now at least seems pretty much self aware. It's mind-boggling to me that people don't realize all the Mozilla stuff is completely empty/PR fluff. You have to say you're an "AI first company" because that's the only thing investors want to hear in 2025. Everyone knows it's all fluff, they say it anyways. I will wait and see if it actually meaningfully affects their product or not.
The complaints meanwhile are spammed everywhere, and like you said, it's the same exact content every time. We get it, new features that you aren't going to use are annoying. Disable them or just don't use them, is is really that big a deal? The CEO literally says they will all be able to be disabled.
When they were first released, there was a fleet/commercial only model that was stripped down and roughly $40k. _That_ was the model that I expected to succeed. Presumably the same type of truck my employer bought from dealerships 20 years ago, with the sterile interior.
But that doesn't address any of your other points, and I can't imagine a business owner that has very little incentive to change how they're buying vehicles to even care about the Lightning if they aren't seeing their friends or themselves in the modern minivan that's called a truck today, just electrified.
I wonder if that $40k price was a loss leading tactic. Seems unrealistic for an electric truck to cost basically the same as the ICE version work truck.
> People are capable, and should be helped to make decisions based on all available information.
To relay a quote, with the source not being very important: "I'm not going to waste a dime on cybersecurity when my officers need bullets and armor." People can be intelligent and capable and have minimal (if you're lucky) bandwidth or tolerance for cybersecurity advice. It's not the crisis they see every day. The advice given to unwilling listeners has to be focused and prioritized.
And... Password leaks and therefore rotations aren't an issue if people are using a strong main password for their manager. Then a leak doesn't transfer to another account and the manager will loudly tell them when a password is found in breach data -- which lines up with NIST's modern advice of avoiding password complexity and rotation, since they've found it to lead to minimal (at best) gained security.
1. People are terrible at creating strong passwords. People will NOT create hundreds of strong passwords.
2. People will not use complex solutions unless actively and rigidly enforced.
3. At best, we can hope that they can create one really good passphrase. That's combined with MFA.
There are people that are exceptions to those, but they're vanishingly small percentage of the population. And unfortunately, there are a way, way more people that think they have something better but are deluding themselves -- like bad card counters that casinos are happy to have at the blackjack table or non-experts rolling their own crypto.
While you and I would love it if password managers would rotate creds, we're not yet at the point where people will use password managers. They're still using CompanynameFall2025!. Next month, they'll dutifully rotate their password to CompanynameWinter2025! because their work policy is still stuck on shitty standards.
> This kind of advice is well-intentioned but misleading. It consumes the limited time people have to protect themselves and diverts attention from actions that truly reduce the likelihood and impact of real compromises.
When you've got 15 seconds to _maybe_ get someone to change their behavior for the better, you need to discard everything that's not essential and stay very very far away from "yes, but" in your explanations.
I've had to inform leadership that stability is a feature, just like anything else, and that you can't just expect it to happen without giving it time.
One leader kind of listened. Sort of. I'm pretty sure I was lucky.
Ask them if they're into pro sports. If so (and most men outside of tech are in some way), they'll probably know the phrase "availability is the best ability".
i got lucky at my last shop. b2b place for like 2x other customer companies. eng manager person (who was also like 3x other managers :/ ) let everything get super broken and unstable.
when i took lead of eng it was quite an easy path to making it clear stability was critical. slow everything down and actually do QA. customer became super happy because basically 3x releases went out with minimal bugs/tweaks required. “users don’t want broken changes immediately, they want working changes every so often” was my spiel etc etc.
unfortunately it was impossible to convince people about that until they screwed it all up. i still struggle to let things “get bad so they can get good”, but am aware of the lesson today at least.
tl;dr sometimes you gotta let people break things so badly that they become open to another way
You put effort into writing an unnecessary tldr on a short post, but couldn't be bothered to properly Capitalize your sentences in order to ensure the readability.
If a person tries to communicate, but his stylistic choice of laziness (his own admission!) gets in the way of delivering his message, it is very tangibly useful information to tell, so that the writing effort could be better optimized for effect.
I wasn't even demanding/telling him what to do. I simply shared my observation, but it's up to him to decide if he wants to communicate better. Information and understanding is power.
Your choice. The worst thing is not knowing ("Why are not posts with reasonable opinions are being downvoted and not engaged with?"). Now you know (you are welcome) and it's your choice what to do with that information.
TV isn't for TV's sake; it's for relaxing a little with someone I care about.
I can read longer form news articles and not need to stay abreast of what's happening daily.
I've found that I'll eventually grow bored and annoyed with things meant to steal attention, at which point I'll excise them from my life. It just might take an unfortunate while to get there.
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