Kristof Provost
JaeNo one ever had to yell “adapt or die” to get me to use any other bit of technology in my life.
Wouldn’t have to threaten my livelihood to buy a Chinese EV. But I guess it’s beatings for us until we buy the products our oligarchs want us to buy.
Dan Sloane
Phil Ashby 
🍵
Ringo De Smet
Flaming Cheeto@me I resisted texting for a long time. If someone was going to cancel plans 10 minutes before meeting someplace it takes me 20 minutes to get to, I wanted them to say it to me in real time.
Jeff GriggI resisted (general public) social media.
Until it was impossible to arrange lunch with my "Generation X" coworkers without it. And later joined another service because I was asked and invited by a respected college in the field, who invited me to a technical discussion group there.
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But also, in a sense, I was active on "social media" decades before there was such a term or popular public servers for it. Like, dial-up BBSs, then UseNet, and later "Ward's Wiki" on the internet, the Portland Pattern Repository — an online collaborative writing project for Design Patterns and Languages.
All of those were very topic or subject driven. Not "following" everything some "social influencers" did.
Todd Knarr@me Yeah. Usually they're yelling "WTF are you using that for? It's not supposed to DO THAT!". If you have to force me to use tech, it's failed miserably.
@me Last time anything came close was C++, my reaction was "Looks neat. Give 'em about a decade to figure out how to use it in production without wreaking havoc on everything and it'll blow C out of the water.".
I learned K&R C on real Unix systems, and was quite successful with it. And ANSI-C, when it came out.
And then I learned object-oriented Smalltalk.
It inspired me to improve my "C" language usage. But every path I could see to doing "better C" would lead to either lots of tedious syntax, or implementing a Cfront-line preprocessor. And that's just not justifiable for one person.
So I was quite glad to be allowed to upgrade to C++.
I was subjected to Microsoft's a-cursed 16-bit C++ compiler for some time. But things improved substantially with their 32-bit C++ compiler.
And, with those technologies, I embraced Microsoft COM, as a much better approach then direct low-level DLL usage.
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(Later, I moved to Java, along with nearly everyone else, for obvious pragmatic reasons.)
@JeffGrigg @me Yes, C (and C++) should never be used for application programming. They're system-level languages first and foremost, despite all attempts to "improve" them. For applications you want more abstraction than they can provide. Java and C# are probably the lowest-level languages I'd use for application development.
David Fleetwood - RG Admin@me I mean, I declined to use cell phones until like 2004 or so. I didn't want one and honestly still don't.
@JeffGrigg @me I plan to ditch mine once it's feasible. I don't think it has done anything healthy for me at the end of the day.
A few years ago, I paired my cell phone with a FitBit-style fitness tracker, and also two other apps to track my regular long bicycle rides.
When I visit my doctor, I literally start the app and hand it to him. Right there is near continuous blood pressure, O2 saturation, heart rate, temperature, and sleep monitoring, going back months.
It has been quite helpful, health-wise.
@JeffGrigg @me I'm glad that works for you, but regardless I look forward to living without one. No judgement, I never said they don't do things or make some things easier, but nothing they do is new or unable to be done via other means and I suspect those mostly do not come with the mental health harms constant connection brings.
Lea@reflex
If you decide to switch to a wise (not dumb!) phone, I recommend the Sunbeam pro (sunbeamwireless.com) for build quality, good UI, support, etc.
In any case, if you get one that can provide a wifi hotspot, you could always keep your old smartphone with no SIM around, in case there's a time when you do need to use a specific app for something. So far I haven't had to do it, but if I ever do get forced to use someone's app, my plan is to get some cheap old smartphone somewhere to install it on and use only when required.
@leadore Thanks for the suggestion! Will bookmark. Sadly I'm likely another 10 years or so from being able to actually ditch my smartphone due to my work, but I am serious about it. It brings me exactly zero joy, and I have a good camera I prefer over my phone anyway.
@reflex
I understand. I was lucky to never have to have or use a personal smartphone for work, and I'm retired now, so I hope it will be a long time before I'm ever forced to get one!
I understand. I was lucky to never have to have or use a personal smartphone for work, and I'm retired now, so I hope it will be a long time before I'm ever forced to get one!
@leadore Lucky you. I was late to the game and all it did was make me realize how much I hate being reachable at all times.
Oggie
patter
John Colagioia@me I like to imagine that the skill- and motivation-atrophy has made it much more difficult to do marketing and advertising. This seems bolstered by that time that Satya Nadella gave that Davos speech about how somebody should really find something useful to do to justify building all those data centers...
Leah Bobet@me I never realized all that time I spent shutting down guys negging me would be good practice, or a parable.
Trixter of the Moon Council@me It's hard to both recognize that people tend to dislike things that are new and unfamiliar and also be confronted by new and unfamiliar things that are objectively terrible.
Andy Wootton@me You only have to adapt to stay alive if the environment has changed. Maybe it's less work to change it back than to keep obeying a dictator's latest order.
Matt Hall
Andrew Jeffery@me maybe they made a logic error
Nicolás Alvarez@me I have seen that phrasing about cryptocurrencies.
That's the opposite of an endorsement.
Dave Neary@me My mind immediately went to the Moneyball line (as I'm sure it was meant to): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQbUZZVv4Rg
Moneyball | Adapt or Die
Kevin P. Fleming@me The blockchain bros did that... 'get crypto or be poor'.
millennial fulcrum
Digital Mark λ ☕️ 🚀 🌗@me @GeoffWozniak
Microsoft was pretty aggressive with the "Windows Experience" shit. But I've never bought a MS product in my life. For a while it was hard to avoid it. I even did have to use a couple work computers, enough to run an X session to a real computer. Now MS is irrelevant again.
So I'm hoping that this happens to LLMs, too.
Mx. Aria Stewart@me Heh. They do this about cars to me. Anything with inarguable upsides, large externalized downsides, and big economic consequences follows this pattern.