I guess getting a flip phone and stick to an eBook reader would be a good solution

thanks for this, so it’s not that bad and it seems to be working fairly good enough… Mmmh I might think about that, how’s the battery life? How long do the tips last? The pen is active or passive?

I also looked into supernote, it’s expansive, but it’s totally worth the money if they can offer a full Linux support with an e ink device, and it’s better than the pinenote because of the repairable hardware and the pen which doesn’t need tips replacements.

But they have kinda pulled back on the Linux development, it looks like it was more marketing than other, they have been promising it for a while but they’ve stated it’s harder than they thought.

I won’t buy an Android device so I’ll wait until a real Linux support is added.

At least if you just do phone calls the attack surface is reduced… They can scan your calls maybe, but not your entire chat history with all of your contacts and give it to an AI which could profile you based on that + you are not scanned on everything else you do on your phone / locked into proprietary ecosystems.

The ideal would just be using a Linux platform and using something like xmpp, but who are you gonna convince to use it? People use what they are used to use, if it’s not popular messaging apps is phone calls… And now it seems a more private alternative…

I think the second batch is already out, called “community edition”

OK I’m getting a flip phone

Xmpp, IRC, Matrix, all great decentralized alternatives, but good luck convincing people in contacting you on Xmpp…

This problem is a problem because it’s a social tendency, not because we don’t have alternatives… Very sadly…

The AI thing is very cool, I think something like that exists, agentic browsers.

But I am scared this would be just the next abstraction, of this chains of abstractions… Corporations are already using AI to profile you even further, the internet will definitely adapt under this pressure, and I believe that in a few years agentic browsers will just become the new norm.

Search engine at first were more objective, now people have learnt to play the game of SEO to attract views, search engines have started to show targeted results, and stuff like Searx came out, or Yaci, claiming to get back a more objective web. There always have been ways to filter out or to try being more objective, but I think the evidence have shown that as a social momentum, this stuff doesn’t work.

Yeah Yaci (self hosted crawler) is a great project, but it’s stagnant, and the prevalence is still a shitty google or bing searche engine, and this is true for other aspects of the web.

Social media? There were more independent social medias while centralized stuff was rampant, now there’s the fediverse and decentralization. Which is super super beautiful, but most people are just unaware. The social momentum is not saying that we are going towards a world where every little server will be connected to other little servers and decide in which parts integrate one another, that would be great, and I’d love to see that, but it’s simply not where we are currently going as a society.

Now it’s the turn of AI, it can be a helpful tool for a while to avoid it all, stuff like agentic browsers can give us some freedom for a while when they will be actually usable and reliable, but in that time the web will have evolved again and pheraps we’ll need to take into account new ways to defend ourselves or to look through the bushes.

It’s a never ending hide and seek unless something really big changes. Linux, free software, open source is all great, but we are continuously pushed towarbalance mainstream in some way or another. And most people live the mainstream, not in the alternative, despite the alternative being objectively better. It is just unsupported by our culture.

It’s an abstraction built on another abstraction built on another abstraction… And the web is just the most clear example of that, I mean the very languages in which the web is built are an example itself: JS (which already is high level)>React>Next. You see? Abstraction on abstraction.

But when will we stop to play games and just stay in the present? Focusing on the core of things?

Do we strive to get to a sort of technological ecstatic point in which all will actually be clear? A sort of technological philosopher stone? And the way to do that is through collection of loads and loads of human data?

My perspective on this is quite pessimistic, because it’s a form of cruel optimism to say that one can solve this problem individually. To change this would require a coordination of consumers, programmers and people revolving around all things of the internet to fix it, unless we assume that AI is somehow sentient and can be better at solving our problems than we do, which I do not exclude: faster and better at looking and processing novelty than we are.

But that will mean that us, as humans, will just be obsolete.

I always come to the conclusion that the web maybe it’s not worth getting used as it is right now, and maybe to feel good we should stop trying to relate to machines and instead just living our own biological needs… Focusing on beings which we can understand better… Living in the present… And stop running, whether it means running away, or towards. Rejecting culture and just staying in our own spaces, cultivating simplicity and balance.

Sorry for the philosophycal rant lmao, I guess this was just more than a technical problem for me lmao, but thanks for your answer!

This is a lovely story