Caillou is actually made be people who are at least trying to do something useful. Coconelon is made by people with a meth dealer mentality.

I got so annoyed by this, that I looked into what the most common GPT quirks are. Now I have a long list of things to hate when reading stuff online. Also, many YT video scripts were clearly written by GPT and edited by nobody. Once you start seeing these signs, you can’t unsee them ever again.

And so it begins…

Laws need to be enforced too. If they are routinely violated without consequences, they lose all meaning.

On some level, I hope that certain companies would sever their ties with me, just like Reddit did. Before switching to Lemmy, I was already thinking of quitting Reddit, and that thought had been brewing in the back of my mind for a few years already. Then the apicalypse happened, and it merely speeded up the process that had already started years before. If the same happens with some other companies too, I’m definitely switching to some mobile Linux that happens to be most viable at the time. Maybe PinePhone, Ubuntu Touch, Librem 5, SailfishOS or whatever.

Currently, things are still easier on this side of the fence, so I’m staying where I am. However when enshittification inevitably gets bad enough, I have only bad options: annoying corporate trash or semi-functional FOSS. Eventually that balance is going to shift in favor of FOSS, and I’m ready to abandon several modern comforts at that point.

In the meanwhile though, several comfort factors are keeping me where I am, and I don’t feel any urgent need to switch just yet. I’ll end up being like a digital hermit, using software 100% incompatible with the rest of the world, totally isolated from everyone and everything. Well, SMS, email and Signal still works, but that’s about it. Don’t expect me to reply to any messages that depend on some creepy spyware.

That means that some people will feel like I’m pretty much impossible to reach, and I’ll feel like some modern comforts are impossible to achieve. I’ll be back in the year 2000, but I guess I’ll be ok with that. I guess I’ll just have to try that out at some point. Many years ago I did just that with LineageOS without GAPPS and oh boy was it a rough ride. Also tried a completely de-googled AOSP, and that was pretty brutal at the time. Perfect for an isolationist digihermit, but I wasn’t quite ready for sacrifices like that at the time.

If I can’t go completely FOSS, I’ll just end up keeping one Android tablet in the bedroom drawer so that I can take care of my bank stuff and other basic necessities. I wonder how viable that sort of life would be these days.

Well, the good thing about the current situation is diversity. Nowadays, we have lots of interesting alternatives for many essentials. Take the entire Fediverse for example. Also, the search monopoly is being challenged by alternatives, some of which are based on the distributed self-hosted instance approach we’ve seen with the Fediverse. Mainstream will always stay with the evil corporations, but at least everyone else can choose something better.

The biggest bottle neck I see with all of this is mobile operating systems. Technically, you can run something other than Android or iOS, but then you’re switching on hard mode in your life. With most other things though, the alternatives are surprisingly viable these days.

And speaking of using shitty software voluntarily. It sort of is, but not really. I’ve persistently avoided WhatsApp, but I keep bumping into that stupid spyware all the time. The pressure is growing every year as more and more people and even businesses become increasingly dependent on it. Fortunately though, people have moved on from Facebook, so I can continue to ignore that platform as I have done so far. I’m just hoping that WhatsApp crosses that threshold and people start switching to Signal.

Oh, absolutely. The privacy aspect of this situation is just insane. Publishing your face and thoughts on Facebook was pretty messed up, and doing the same thing for career purposes isn’t any better.

The only reason why I made a LI account was basically the same reason why companies started making websites in the late 90s. If you don’t have a website, your company doesn’t exist, and that’s just an unnecessary barrier to doing business. If you don’t have a LI profile, you don’t exist and that’s just an unnecessary barrier to getting employed. The unfortunate realities of our world today…

And that’s not even the only disgustingly broken system we tolerate these days. Academic publishing, advertising, social media visibility, just to name a few. How did we end up with a mess like this.

I think the best thing about LI is the easy apply feature. It’s genuinely useful to standardize and streamline the application process. When every company has their own system, it adds such a threshold to applying that you don’t even want to go through all that trouble just to roll the dice and get rejected. It adds so much friction that it hurts both parties. Easy apply fixes that IMO.

The rest isn’t that useful, and some of it we could do without. Like those lions and motivational aphorism posts that fall apart if you think about them more than 3 seconds.

My first thought was that you can’t lose something you never had, but the article doesn’t fit that idea. Apparently, some people once used it for tasks related to their profession. I guess that kind of use can give it a professional aura of sorts. Obviously, the rest of it is just one huge toxic dumpster fire, but some people are really trying to use it for something better.

Professionals don’t really get to choose their platform. They just use whatever happens to be the one that gets the job done of reaching the right people. If xitter no longer fits the description, professionals switch to the next thing.