I confess to reading HN, guilty as charged.

I think the topics are sometimes interesting, but I can’t help reading the comments, and they are too toxic, so I avoid the whole site

i don't read it. the last valuable thing i got was when Chas Emerick's Clojure book listed in 2012 😉

I’m trying to wean myself off of it. There’s some incredibly interesting stuff at times, though

@U052852ES you are forgiven. Your penance is 10 hail mary's and 3 updates to any YAML configuration you can find lying around.

:rolling_on_the_floor_laughing::rolling_on_the_floor_laughing::rolling_on_the_floor_laughing:

that's pretty harsh. 3 YAML configuration updates. jeez!

it's a terrible sin 😆

I don't read the comments (unless someone I trust points me to one that is actually good), but I have followed links through there. I put reddit in the same bucket, tho I have been seeing good emacs things on reddit recently. I'm not going to live there like I do here though.

I'm just subscribed to the feed and click on interesting headlines, never read the comments

I've recently quit hacker news

I only open it rarely, but whenever I do, I find myself unable to resist the temptation to read most of the 30 threads on 1st page…

… as for the comments, I oscillate between feeling those are really smart people, and feeling like they are elites disconnected with “average software development”

maybe what I am looking for is a combo of “smart, empathetic, grounded, and with a creative vision of the future”

Yeah the comments are absorbing but often lack humanity… I am disturbed by the enthusiasm for stable diffusion that I saw there as well

Stable diffusion is the product of theft and villainy

oh what’s with the stable diffusion? I’m too busy and am totally out of the loop for this one (haven’t even read any technical paper/news/blog/repo at all). The only thing I know is it is some new AI algorithm (?) that makes it possible to create realistic pictures with a prompt

it's training set was gathered with no regard for copyright and it has no safeguards, i.e. it can produce explicit sexual (or worse) images

without being too specific

oh…………

Not sure… think it might be something like slashdot

I stopped following twitter years ago, felt really good not looking at it anymore. Too much !@#

I was on vacation in England in March when it really dawned on me how much I'd relied on Facebook/Messenger to organize my social life -- and ended up needing my partner to organize everything with my friends while we were there 😐

paradoxically they can enter the competition on the category “technology causing the most social harm”…

intermittent rewards, addictive potential, social comparison, echo chamber, negativity and polarization, the list goes on and on

it’s basically a giant psychological manipulation lab to combinatorially tries out every dark aspect of the human psyche one by one

Yeah, from my p.o.v. the good they do -- and they do provide value -- is massively outweighed by the negatives.

maybe once we’ve weaned off dependency, do some soul searching on why we’d stomped so low without realising it… (edit: arrrr it’s so hot here that my brain’s operating in reduced capacity hence the vocab loss) (note to self: it’s “rein in” - to limit or control)

being social is one of the basic human needs, but if we are not aware/have blindspot, this powerful motivational force can be abused by tech to subtly change our behavior

Unfortunately, an awful lot of people do not have that level of self-awareness in the first place...

… which makes said manipulation more insidious (who do they think they are? God?)

on a note, getting off social media is one thing - gotta replace it with something else that’s more positive/wholesome

(not the blind optimism “positivity” though)

I agree it would be nice to have social network without the :poop:. Obvious options: regulate as a public utility, natioanlize if that fails.

i find facebook massively improved by deleting all fb apps and only accessing it via the web, blocking any notifications and never but never going anywhere near fb.messenger ... it becomes a pull system i can dip into when i feel like it, and mostly just allows me to maintain the long tail of my social graph

I found a chrome extension which blocks the endless scroll page with new messages on FB. Since I installed that, I forgot Facebook for weeks on end, but since I also manage a few groups there, I have to visit sometimes

I rely on a selection of relaxing and healing music (introversion) + interacting with real world friends on private comm channel (extroversion)

Exactly 😄