YHK - yet another hacker news clone

You know, it really is entirely optional to hang out at the Nazi bar.

> A phone connected to cell is an always-on tracking device

A phone connected to wifi is also an always-on tracking device. You can't really escape this without removing the "phone" part of the equation

> I propose a philosophy of technology use called digital minimalism in which you radically reduce the time you spend staring at screens, focusing on a small number of digital activities that strongly support things you deeply value, and then happily ignoring the rest.

> Click on the tweet and look around its quotes and responses, the same way that someone would morbidly stare at a car accident.

Twitter gets money from ads. They can sell more ads for more money when they can demonstrate eyeballs and eyeball time. Therefore, they're incentivized to keep your eyeballs on the app for as long as possible. If that means putting car accidents in front of you, that's what it'll do!

I strongly believe that social media is basically a lost cause for this and a few other reasons. I tried out Mastodon and Bluesky, but people there don't seem to actually be interested in conversation, and there's physical limitations that prevent meaningful conversation anyway in the form of character limits. ~200 characters is simply not enough space for anything meaningful to be conveyed, so the platform selects for snippy clapbacks and pithy virtue signalling.

I'm also unconvinced there's anything of value to be had from these platforms, maybe including HN. I seem to be hearing about the new hotness in the AI space for example by just regularly attending coworking events. I guess if everyone stopped using Twitter, that would stop being the case. Or maybe we'd go back to RSS...

I think that's telling. If you're reducing digital human interaction on social media (which yes, has its share of problems) but replacing it with "social" interaction with AI, that's not minimalism. You're replacing one vice with an even worse one and coping about it.

I have tried this very same thing on https://grimoire.bio. Large corpus of biological knowledge with detailed visualizations that are shown immediately upon searching, but adding LLM answer when missing/needed.

I have never seen a Hitler post but if I saw one I would immediately block that user and the algorithm knows that. It doesn't show me people arguing it shows me debates and tech. Because that's what I taught it to do. It is not even hard it just requires a little discipline.

When a friend sends a link I refuse to click on it unless my VPN is on and I'm using Mullvad Browser. I don't want their taste (which is quite often look at this outrageous thing) ruining my feed.

The thing that I’d been looking for on this minimal setup was a way to prevent access to the browser or installing apps at will. It was easy enough when I was on iOS. I just used Apple Configurator [1] to block Safari and the App Store, but on GrapheneOS, there was no great solution.

Recently I made a device owner app [2] which allows hiding any UI app and locking itself. It ended up being quite an elegant solution as I found out that I could do it all in the main Owner profile and allow full access to app stores for updates. The only way around it is with the lock code or a factory reset.

This makes my phone a very private device whose functionality I intentionally set ahead of time. It can only do what the apps I’ve chosen can do. I prefer browsing and similar on a computer.

[1] Apple’s Mac MDM app anyone can use. You need a Mac and to factory reset your phone first.

[2] https://beeswax.getflourish.org/

Getting this experience is simple: don’t click or garbage, occasionally block content you don’t like.

My Instagram app (besides showing no ads) shows just the stories and feeds of people I follow, chronologically. Just a couple days this way will make you realize how little content there is, my friend's Korea trip has been the top one for like a couple weeks already.

Then you can get the DMs to avoid FOMO and realize how antisocial the whole thing is.

No idea if it works for x, I left that long ago and everytime I've checked out of curiosity I've been shocked at the absolute cesspit it is.

You actually can just leave Twitter and read a book instead.

It is really interesting to see a third-party client for Twitter still operational. How is this still possible? This seems like an unauthorized third-party hack that would likely get shut down with too much attention?