Hacker News

Every time people use costs I really wonder what’s going on. My wife still uses an iPhone 13 and life for her is not particularly different from my iPhone 16. You don’t have to do any of this stuff:

> I have to service and finance a £600 phone, pay a monthly contract and subscription to Apple, I then have to install an adblocker because otherwise sites are just unusable

No one is going to connect you to a network from wherever you are for free. Sure that’s true. You have to go to a library or public service if you want that.

But also all these things are entirely optional. One of my bank accounts was locked out of online use because of something or the other and I just used it as my debit card and went in to the branch to withdraw money. I much preferred my other accounts where I could also use online stuff and when I finally got around to solving it it was only 30 min with one of those branch managers.

But I learned that it’s not really that bad to be cut off from online services. It pretty gracefully degrades to just being a banking service like the 2000s.

I haven’t lived in the UK for a decade so it would be a pain for me from here in the US to do so with my HSBC account but all local banking is fine and I could probably continue to use my debit card.

This entire genre of rant is popular on social media like HN these days and I really don’t get it. Everything is awesome. The Internet is blazing fast and has 1000x the content it used to and it’s all incredibly well indexed and available via LLMs and search. This feels very rose-tinted about the past.

> The internet was about connection, but the way I see it, it’s become a great way for bad actors to...

There seems to be a profound confusion somewhere in here that people come with an evil bit and we're going to toggle technology so that those people can't use it and everyone else can.

Y'know, racists use cars to drive to their racist conventions or whatever. On publicly funded roads. Possibly with time freed up by a strong welfare system. Just because people someone doesn't like use or made something has little relevance to the value of the thing. Horrible people make wonderful things in horrible ways all the time, history is rife with it [0].

Getting off most social media does seem like a win though.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber is a great example, this man is arguably greatly responsible for billions of people being alive today. Which is absolutely stunning in context of the rest of his Wikipedia page.

The “good” news is that, if LLMs really do reach AGI, and if we still live under this same economic system that ruined the Internet, there won’t be this decades-long grieving process. It will be a short one, if we’re aware of it at all.

Was I the only one thinking that the author of Careless People was careless herself?

I felt that she is much closer in values to the Facebook executives than she was trying to make it seem. Yes, she failed at her job because it was an impossible one, and she got no shares because she was too late to the party, but the bravery and carelessness she showed were absolutely mind-blowing, for my taste at least.

It is quite sad, isn’t it.

Internet has become both tool of mass mind destruction and tool of joy.

High bandwidth connection, mobile phones without keyboard - this combo has changed the way people use internet.

Anxiety among kids when they can’t use phone and some of highly addictive apps (TT, WA, IG… you name it) is what concerns me more than what we do with phones (boomers, 90s kids, whatever :) And elders who are vulnerable to all scams (money, political) imaginable.

Is there a way out? IDK. Everyone has to start inside as OP did.

I'm not a doomer, but when it comes to the internet, I only see things getting worse.

I think they hate the commercialized Internet, and I do too.

well said

The term "actor" should be reserved for thespians.

The internet isn’t the web/social media.

People don’t complain about roads & gutters because there’s idiots on them that drive. Idiots that drive get the deserved blame.

Words matter. The internet rocks but social media sucks, apps suck, elected representatives suck.