meristohm

Do you understand the unbridled desire to consume a massive amount of resources to move a human body in a multi-ton knobby-tyred truck from home to school to work to grocery store and back, and to play the flashiest games, to wear shorts inside during the winter, and to talk to robots as if they are friends? I understand that desire, and how, with billions of people having access to such power over enough time, we are now "enjoying" extreme weather more frequently, killing so much other life with our pollution, and harming ourselves in the process? And, because that is stressful to face, many of us are inclined to dive back into the consumption cycle for distraction and diversion?

I'd argue my quality of life is higher for using only hand-me-down phones (current one is ~8yo, thanks to LineageOS) because when I'm feeling dysregulated I run out of phone-based distractions really quickly (I don't allow JavaScript, and I don't install any games). I'm healthier for walking and cycling everywhere within ~16km of home (privileged to live in the city, as expensive as it has become, but I'd still do it if I lived further out), and for using heating & cooling only to take the edge off the outside temperature (16C in the winter, 26C in the summer), mindful of where all this energy comes from, what the effects are at scale, and the quality of life of future generations long after I'm dead. I don't do all this for efficiency, but for effectiveness (that of my body, my default mobility and data-processing machine) and consuming a reasonable amount of energy rather than one that, at scale, will burn my house down.

Regarding not-yet e-waste, some people just like tinkering, and the challenge of getting old hardware to still function as a useful tool.

I also understand the reaction to other people's "nonsense"; I sometimes go there, too, and it's an ongoing effort to reel it back to what I can reasonably control.

Is it helpful to have all this spelled out for you?

...and it's fine to not use the loud, vibrating power saw and instead take some extra time to use a handsaw, and thus get more practiced at it.

It's fine to hire movers, but sometimes they end up damaging stuff. My solution is have a lot less stuff, and move it myself.

I increasingly have more respect for the Amish community one of my relatives lives near, at least in terms of their considered, intentional limits set on resource use. I don't agree with all their choices, and some seem arbitrary, but I respect their autonomy to choose.

I choose to move around the world primarily under my own power or augmented by a battery (supplies 2/3 of the Wattage I need to make my cargo bicycle move); harm reduction in the face of fossil-fuel addiction. I choose not to use generative AI because I'd rather human do more work for themselves instead of selling short future humans with profligate resource consumption.

It's fine to strive for things, but the most important thing in my life is my relationships with other humans. If I'm a person who can't walk, and am in physical therapy towards being able to walk, it's fine to keep working at it, and it's fine to never be able to walk; what matters is how I get on with my mates, and spending massive amounts of electricity on data centers is arguably harmful to the health of interpersonal relationships.

I reckon a lot of people on this forum have poorer health thanks to man-made pollution.

The more money a person has, the greater the chance they spend it in ways that increase environmental harm. (Travel is a big one, and buying large homes, remodeling homes, heating and cooling those homes, well beyond the private sufficiency that would be enough for us if we also supported public luxuries instead of playing Smaug)

Rather than corporate health I'm more concerned with ecosystem health (actual eco-system, as in interconnected living beings, not the word applied to software...), and care much more about investing in the performance of the ecosystems (based on land, water, and air) that sustain life in the region I have this tiny bit of influence on.

Corporations are fictions, a game we're playing. After they go up in smoke, the land will still be here.

Would there be so many billions if we didn't figure out how to convert petroleum into fertilizer and so many other useful things? My point is that, just because we now have billions, it feels wrong to justify maintaining those billions of people at the luxury levels so many of us enjoy. We differ from other animals only by degrees, not by kind. From watching so many nature documentaries over the years, and reading nonfiction books about animals, I understand many mammal newborns don't make it into childhood. I'm not convinced that a high human infant-mortality rate is bad. It just feels bad, and with our pathological focus on feeling happy and suppressing sadness, a consequence seems to be we make decisions out of momentary selfishness rather than care for future generations long after we individuals are dead.

Because all this fancy tech requires concrete and iron (smelted by burning fossil fuels), we're still in the Iron Age: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2024/03/how-to-escape-from...

I learned about snail teeth in The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey! It's a lovely, shortish nonfiction book about a woman with a rare infection that affects her nervous system and has her mostly in bed for years, during which time she observes a snail on her nightstand (that a well-meaning friend brought in from the woods) and then does a deep-dive into mollusks thanks to public-library books. I read this to my child and was inspired to lie down in a field and listen to a slug chewing on plants, tchk-tchk-tchk.

For an animated version of this story, see Cosmos, season 2 (I forget which episode, but it was helpful in teaching about this in high school)

Fair question (I'm neither the blog author or the person who linked it here). I read the short blog entry and the why is not answered. My own reasons for de-Googling is that I'm uncomfortable with how I pay for Google's services (with my usage data, time, attention, media data, etc). I still have a gmail account because I'm skeptical it won't be reused in a potentially-harmful-to-me-or-others way and because I haven't put in the time to answer that concern and go through the account-deletion steps. I have it automatically send any emails (very few these days) to my ProtonMail account, which I pay for. I'd rather pay a few US dollars a month to a company that at least doesn't seem based on selling more-more-more (Google being an advertisement company).

Taxes support the infrastructure that those with Dragon's Sickness need to keep extracting gold from the uninfected and less symptomatic.

Years ago, when I was considering putting effort and time into learning more computer programming languages, I realized I cared far more about learning other human languages: I was a recent parent, and the importance of strong, positive bonds with other humans was dawning on me, along with an appreciation for mortality. So, I dropped a few energy levels in the computing realm and jumped into learning more spoken languages, using Anki, library books, podcasts, movies in the target languages (thanks to kanopy, another public-library resource paid for by tax money), and, more recently, Clozemaster and Mango (through the local public library! and they have some indigenous north american languages, but none from the region where I currently live; I'll seek local help for that).

What does "human flourishing" mean? And why do you want humans to have maximal access to energy? (what I'm getting at is, what story of humanity matters to you?)

I abhor exercise for the sake of it. Instead, I refuse to use a car to do anything but bring my family members to distant medical appointments, and the rare carpool'd vacation. Anything within ~ten miles of home I do with human power, sometimes augmented by stored electrical energy (cargo ebike; I contribute ~1/3 the Wattage). Thus, I get plenty of exercise throughout the day. We used to meet our needs by moving our bodies. Understandably, there are perceived benefits to outsourcing transportation, and very real consequences.

Exception is a morning plank to wake up my core, and sometimes forward bends with a weight. I don't like to do it, but I do feel better afterwards (like with cold showers), so I do it. Harder to do with longer exercise routines, which is why I addressed the cause of my unease rather than slapped on plasters.

Somewhat related: in logging country, on several occasions I've seen logging trucks full of tree trunks pass each other in opposite directions.

One way to reduce the speed of such large vehicles in urban areas is cyclists to conspicuously use the wider lane. I do this regularly with my Class 1 ebike (assists to 20mph), in part because the wider lane is smoother (I often carry a child whose disability means they don't handle bumps well), there's less debris, and especially because I'm so much more visible. Yeah, I get honked at (which means drivers see me!), but the speed limit is an upper limit, not a minimum, and I'm usually going close to that (yeah, I know that doesn't matter when we get splattered by a road-rager in a toy tank, but I will not sit idly by). The normalization of massive climate-controlled lazy-boxes is both bonkers to me as a person who thrives on moving under my own power, and understandable: we like getting something for ~nothing, and it's so easy not to consider the long-term consequences of regularly spending fuel to move a couple tons of metal and plastic to drive two miles to pick up some groceries.

Long-time de-Googled Pixel user here: while it's not for most of the people I know, for whom the barrier to install LineageOS / GrapheneOS / etc on their Android pocket computer is as yet too high, advertisement-company Google's nonsense can be uninstalled. It helps that I use my less-smart phone much less than back when these things were a novelty. Nice to be able to call and text, snap photos, take notes, visit some websites with JavaScript turned off, set alarms, and learn stuff with Anki, all with one high-tech slab that fits in my pocket. I also appreciate F-Droid and the contributions of so many people making useful software. Still, I'd trade computers and all the pollution from the underlying infrastructure for lower population density and the ability to regularly eat fish from local waterways without getting poisoned.

...and a consequence of living in dense concrete "jungles" is increased energy consumption to cool ourselves, further increasing average global temperatures. What might the consequences be of living amongst trees (and plants in general) and spending much more of our time meeting our basic needs by moving around on the earth under our own power?

Yep! Evaporation through leaf stomata creates the internal pressure drop that pulls water from the earth into the roots.

I like helping others learn and grow. Having a child helped focus my sense of purpose, but I already cared to help others, as a classroom teacher and private tutor. Parenting gave me a second childhood, during which I read Complex PTSD by Pete Walker (2010) and significantly reduced passing on the ongoing trauma I experienced during my childhood. I find joy in being okay with simply pausing and breathing like a resting dog (inhale until full, then relax and let it out, not inhaling again until the need arises), observing how my body feels wherever I am. I find joy in moving around the world under my own power or augmented by an ebike (bakfiets, for carrying my child, groceries, etc). I do not find joy in sitting in a car and letting gasoline or electricity move me and more than a ton of metal and plastic along a lifeless strip of asphalt, but I do it to meet the medical needs of my family members (otherwise I seldom outsource my mobility needs beyond human-powered machines). I find joy in learning, which is part of why I keep returning to HN; I find many of your choices to be harmful to life on earth in the long run, and it's also where I learned of solar.lowtechmagazine.com, so here I am.

I prefer breathing like a resting dog: deep inhale, immediately relax and exhale (just let it out; it'll be forceful at first and taper off), and take the next inhale when the need arises. Ideally I do this with water and food, too (feast/fast). I find the 4-4-4-4 contrived, but I can see the potential mental-focus benefit.

Zero. Unless by "AI" you mean "software tool", in which case full-text search in Calibre ebook reader, language training with Clozemaster (I don't use the LLM-generated definitions, nor the images--too disturbing, and I dislike the refusal to use human-made art, like that at thenounproject), spam filters for email, Libby for library access (I now refuse to click on the LLM-generated suggestions for related reading), and The Internet, where I prefer sites like text.npr.org and solar.lowtechmagazine.com because they're static.

The main exception I'll easily grant for LLM use is towards equitable access for those with disabilities, and possibly for text-to-speech in general, though both of these things can be addressed with more human-to-human support; we don't have to do everything by ourselves.

Incredibly efficient, but if they're burning hydrocarbons to move, at scale they are incredibly damaging to earth's atmosphere, and to animals disrupted by engine and propeller noise.

International trade is wonderful, all this new tech we're drowning in is amazing, and- understand that every one of us will eventually die, hopefully passing on some positive influence to others along the way, and that it turns out opting for the new car, the big climate-controlled house, the weekly/monthly/annual/still-too-frequent long-distance flights/drives, the new pocket computer every few years, the fancy unnecessarily-powerful laptop, the hours spent on all the man-child hobbies because we haven't outgrown our childhood insecurities, all this is an incredible waste compared to the meaning derived from healthy relationships with people within walking distance, tending the land we get our food from.

Too many of us (here in the United States, anyway) rely on external energy conversion to do what we humans once did with our stored chemical energy. Using a drug to treat the symptoms of that technology-enabled behavioral dis-ease feels wrongheaded. A huge step in a healthier direction involves moving around the world predominantly under our own power or equivalent (a nod to those with mobility disabilities, and equitable access to resources), and by "equivalent to walking or cycling" I'm not suggesting multi-ton automobiles, but electric-assist or electric-powered bicyles, tricycles, and wheelchairs.

If the clog involves toilet paper, I'd rather not put a brush in that. Here's how I use a plunger effectively: Submerge it and then angle it to swap out some air for liquid, so you have more mass to push into the pipe. Tip it back upright, then slowly push down, relax and let the bell fill back up with water, and repeat, finding a resonant frequency where the pushed water doesn't just jet out the sides (due to imperfect seal) but because there's a pressure-wave action the clog gets moved in and out repeatedly until it breaks down enough for water to scoot by. Then one more flush to clean the plunger.

Whatever I do for money isn't a huge part of my identity, so telling a boss (if/when I find myself in that situation) to stuff it with the AI nonsense isn't going to be difficult. Decoupling one's self-worth from the job makes it much easier to roll with being fired.

"Playing along" is a great way to be part of someone else's potentially-harmful project. Consider your values, and don't cross those lines. If the boss is upset about it, they have options. I don't do their work for them.

Collective action with your fellow workers against enshittification is a humanist way forward.

A poem I composed from the section headings:

It's Not "AI" Its Boosters Are Misanthropic The Hype Sucks And It’s Encroachingly Ubiquitous Its Obsequity Is Annoying And Its Prose Is Vapid Its Boosters Don’t Give A Shit About Consent So What Am I Even Fucking Doing Here

"Surely, you have one job and that is to deliver tech that works—not to waste users' time by giving them irrelevant copy to read which has no functional value."

Microsoft has been doing this for years, with its messages during Windows setup, along the lines of "sit back and relax while we work our magic" which is at best annoying.

Sure, a four-day, twelve-hour-per-day work week.

Huh. Us meatbags are not just artificial intelligences, we're organic intelligences and thus more important than robots (who are not alive; even if we make golems and infuse them with "life", they are not human animals), and all of us are in training throughout our lives, so this means training on copyrighted material is fair use.

Edit: I see another commenter, presumably human, clarified: "legally-acquired copyrighted books" Even with the arguments about AI being potentially helpful to disabled humans, one healthier route is to help each other out directly instead of dividing and conquering with technology, in the name of helping. Feels like one of the aims of Capitalists is to put us each into our Matrix (1999 movie) battery capsules and bleed us dry while we're distracted.

Perhaps part of the point is to stir action towards not accepting the status quo, harmful as it is? We can do better.

In keeping with the list preceding "climate change", consider changing it to:

"...advance AI, change climate."