I am experiencing the exact same thing, but in my mind it’s a disillusionment not with tech itself but with tech products.

I have my Linux PC set up so that I can use it on the couch at home while hanging out with my family. I have a smart phone, but I consciously try to use it as little as possible.

Now instead of following the details of the next generation of phones/consoles/GPUs/AIs, I like to tinker with existing technology that I haven’t learned yet. And since I work on computer stuff at work all day, I try to spend my time at home doing analog stuff based in the real world, ideally outdoors even if that means my own yard.

So many comments about the power settings thing, but this isn’t about working effectively and efficiently.

You can take AI out of this article and it would be just as sad, but it wouldn’t get the clicks.

This article is either helping push, or documenting the push, that if YOU are a higher tier of worker bee that wants to prove your superior worth to your bound legal entity, AND you want to virtue signal having your head on straight to all the lazy selfish people around you actually being present in the moment, then YOU need ShinyTechBroProduct!

Ohhh all the cool parents are into ShinyTechBroProduct! All the other lame asses who PaId AtTeNtiOn To tHeiR KiDs aren’t going to be the next Elon Jobs now are they!

Yeah, I don’t do web stuff, but I use the browser every day for all the microsoft stuff my employer uses and it’s 99% LibreWolf and then 1% switching to Firefox ESR that cane preinstalled on debian.

If something didn’t work at that point, I’d probably fire up my Windows VM I use for testing before I’d install even chromium. I’ve installed it before but there’s just no need now.

You can’t take my ‘i’, we have been together.

intergenerational prosperity

If I know my rich sociopath talk, this means “generations of MY descendants being old money rich and saluting the giant portrait of ME over their comically large fireplaces.”

I have a pretty old lifetime Plex pass that I got on sale.

I’m still 100% a Jellyfin convert. Keeping my Plex server while trying out Jellyfin myself lasted even less time than my Windows partition after I had linux installed.

It cuts to ONE OF the roots of the problem. It’s just not the “evil gigacorp” problem.

It’s the problem of the effect on the user, regardless of how evil or altruistic the AI and its creator are.

I have lamented in a few comments recently about how many people seem to think the purpose of technology is to make it so they don’t have to put effort into their life. They don’t need to learn, and they don’t need to create. They just need the right technology and a good enough bank balance to pay for it.

I’m a tech person but for the last couple years I have made my hobbies and home life as much about nature and life sciences and physically interacting with the outdoors, building shit, taking care of my animals, etc. It has been very very good.

Better use the self-checkout while you still can!

https://www.gs1us.org/industries-and-insights/by-topic/sunrise-2027

Pfft. I’m in my 40s with an established engineering career and a small home that I’ve owned for 18 years now.

I am also not paying for any streaming services I can avoid, not buying many games, sailing the high seas, and our cars are like 13/14 years old.

Because shit is crazy, especially being in the US. I am keeping my world small and focusing on my family and my community.

Alarming, but not surprising.

The setup that works for me is LibreWolf as primary browser and Firefox ESR if a site doesn’t work.

I don’t do web development or anything, but I haven’t run into anything that hasn’t worked recently. Librewolf works for almost everything, but if some stupid login page doesn’t like some privacy thing that librewolf is doing, I’ll try one more time with some more loose permissions, then it’s over to normal firefox.

All of those things are true in the US. It is just somehow culturally acceptable here that a third of the cars commuting to the office or stopping at the grocery store are giant trucks that should be commercial vehicles.

Oh it was a long time ago, but not so long ago that it’s suspicious.

Yep. My disdain for the combination of fascist government where everything is surveillance, and sociopathic corporations and billionaires where everything is a cynical cash grab, overcame me excitement for tech “products” a long time ago. I’m in the US so it’s especially bad.

I still have a smart phone that’s 4-5 years old, and I do of course use it every day, but I consciously avoid using it every hour. I love when I misplace it in my own house, to then not look for it for hours. The only person who is going to message me anything urgent is my wife and she knows where to find me.

Constant phone addiction is one of those situations where when you remove yourself from it you can more easily see it in others. It’s like there’s a new form of body language where when you see that slight forward tilt of the head you know they are in the Phone Zone without even seeing the rest of their body.

They are the starters for the entire Eastern United States!

I hear that if you super-upgrade to the enterprise plan, they will promise your legal department to be totally cool with ALL your data and prompts!

That’s the neat part when you blur the lines between the government and the private sector. So-called leaders who are interested in power, control, and “winning” more than upholding their oaths of office can just use the private sector to do the things the government is restricted from doing. Then when their businesses can’t compete on their own, they can lean on the legal + force options the government has.

I’m starting to think this habit we have of electing selfish sociopathic bad-faith actors to powerful positions of service is less than optimal.

One hand yeah. I fortunately run Linux at work and most of Microsoft’s fuckups are just fun Lemmy threads for me.

But the company is a Dell + M365 corporation like the last few places I’ve worked, so I DO get the privilege of using Teams and Outlook in a browser. Good lord has it been slow lately, but good on them at least for the functionality being there.

It seems like a pretty common thing for people to expect that the luxuries of modern technology include not having to do anything you don’t want to, including being present for your own life.

People make self-destructive choices every day. (insert “always have been” 🌏🧑‍🚀🔫🧑‍🚀)

I wonder if many superstitions in rational secular people could just be bad terminology for behavior that can have some good reasons behind it.

One is using intuition to access your brain power in a way that’s different than conscious thought and verbal reasoning. For me at least, when I have spent months and even years troubleshooting or upgrading different parts of a system, I develop an intuition where I can track down certain types of issues really quickly or with very limited information.

There are often things that, in the wise words of Mr. Plinkett, you didn’t notice – but your brain did.

Second, and most important, is the ubiquitous one-two punch that there are always hidden variables and that they are by definition not easy to predict.

I have had my time wasted by way dumber and more seemingly random things than that worm drawing. I’m not a biologist but I could still speculate a bunch of potential reasons that, while wrong, would still be way more predictable than actual issues I’ve dealt with at work and home.

I can also predict that in that situation I would absolutely keep doing the drawings. My line of reasoning here applies to many other situations as well: The world is complicated. There could be a helpful effect from some part of the drawing process, or there could be no effect, OR there could be some crazy interaction of 3 different variables. Don’t change anything, finish the current task, then decide if figuring out the cause & effect is worth doing next. (some of that also comes from my internal voice tasked with keeping my adhd in check)

said it would be easy

Ah, the innocence of inexperience. (Giving them the benefit of the doubt of course. )

I work on old undocumented c/c++ spaghetti code for embedded systems. In multiple planning meetings I have gotten to use lines like “this looks like a single character change but testing it makes me really nervous” and have gotten zero pushback or raised eyebrows.

It’s usually a few laughs and often another engineer or our manager will chime in to agree with me and describe some more of the context or whatever, lol.