Your thermostat has opinions now. Your television requires a login. Your car updates itself overnight, and sometimes when you start it in the morning, the interface has rearranged itself, as if someone broke in and reorganized your dashboard while you slept.

Your earbuds won’t play music until they’ve updated their firmware. Your refrigerator wants to be on your Wi-Fi.

a little repetitive but ⅓ of it was fun to read.

⅔ was better not read 🤷

Not a fan of the continuous scroll article. It is putting more onus on me, making me responsible not just for reading words and examining images, but for triggering animations, setting the pacing, and un-distracting myself when I scroll back and forth to rewatch how the screen interprets various inputs because I can’t help myself.

Yes, you have to scroll anyway. But scrolling is more akin to turning a page than giving the “See 'n Say” another whirl. I agree with the authors sentiment but wrapping it in an overly complex delivery mechanism has just a hint of irony.

Amen, brother.

I’ll also point out, in my sandwich-board-wearing way, that the entire mental illness industry is based on a similar dynamic. Rational responses to societal failures are blamed on the individual and treated individually at great cost and, not surprisingly, poor effectiveness.

tell me you’ve never had a good therapist without telling me you’ve never had a good therapist

Not for lack of trying.

It’s easier to become your own good therapist than to find one.

I realized, as a hobby I’ve been making a music player - it’s a lot of work, but the consistent goal of that work is: I want my music player to need me less, as little as possible. I want my music to play like a radio station, without the ads, without subscriptions, without constant neediness. Turn it on, music that I probably want to hear starts playing, end of interactions until I turn it off.

Shameless plug for a very not ready for primetime code repo - ask your LLM agent to set it up and try it out for you: github.com/MangoCats/Lempi

That might be true, but the person you’re replying to is also correct (coming from someone with a great therapist).

My depression is the logical and rational reaction to my perpetually diminishing material circumstances.

I’ve got pills I take to not feel hopeless (and they work, surprisingly), but objectively speaking, it’s not looking good, and I’ve never seen anything get better in my lifetime, and I’m almost 40

surely you can see the irony in placing blame back onto the individual with this reply lol

That fact that this is one of the most grossly over-engineered websites I’ve ever seen really undercuts the point of the article for me.

It’s a fucking blog post. Not everything needs to have animated UI and fancy scrolling and interactive elements. Just let me read, Jesus Christ…

They do offer a plain UI. Leave people to their glitz, maybe it’s what brings them joy.

I thought the glitz enhanced the reading experience - and thoroughly appreciated the offering of plain static text HTML, but didn’t use it for myself.

I loved this article. Pretty sure it has html only so not sure why everyone complains.

www.terrygodier.com/phantom-obligation

The previous one was also a good read.

I realized, as a hobby I’ve been making a music player - it’s a lot of work, but the consistent goal of that work is: I want my music player to need me less, as little as possible. I want my music to play like a radio station, without the ads, without subscriptions, without constant neediness. Turn it on, music that I probably want to hear starts playing, end of interactions until I turn it off.

Shameless plug for a very not ready for primetime code repo - ask your LLM agent to set it up and try it out for you: github.com/MangoCats/Lempi