Great article. Living and enjoying life is a skill that needs conscious practice and intentionality.
The title would make more sense as the default settings being "too low" since Low is the setting where when we trade off fidelity for speed, but "too high" has a nice ring to it.
I've tried a lot of personal cloud options (ownCloud, a Resilio Sync mesh, CloundMounter + B2) and somehow ended up back on iCloud because of this.
My next experiment is just to use NFS over Nebula/Tailscale and see how much data I can just host off my NAS, but it's surprisingly been quite a journey for a simple problem.
You can't really switch away from iCloud without sacrificing it's deep integration.
The whole whole ecosystem is designed around it.
Don't get me wrong, Apple could've written their software with different upstream options, but they choose not to - hence going away from iCloud forces you to give up on a lot of features
I'm just pointing this out because if you've already attempted different options and went back to iCloud, then trying others isn't likely to be worthwhile, honestly.
You'd first have to accept that moving away from it means sacrificing features such as the photos sync (including delete etc).
That for me has been Dropbox. It's not even a shadow of what it used to be as a sleek, perfect sync tool, but the competition is so bad and getting worse every day (along with Dropbox) that "Dropbox + Cryptomator" is literally the best option I still have. Tresorit seemed to come close, but it's bug-ridden and really sluggish, and their support is painfully useless.
And as someone who has been in Apple's hardware ecosystem for more than a decade now (almost exclusively), I can't in my right mind bring myself to use any of its software/service products (and for good reasons, seeing it go bad to very bad to downright pathetic over the years) except for the OS because that's not really an option. Yes, I do have a small Cryptomator folder syncing to iCloud as well, but that's just because I wanted to have that as a backup sync, and it's a very tiny set of data that I anyway backup to elsewhere.
The bad of it? Yes, keeping everything under one roof really feels simple and easy.
The good? If Apple blocks my a/c today or nukes it, it will take a few hours to few days but I will get back everything single piece of data I have online on a new laptop or phone (Apple or Android or Windows or Linux) - everything! And it's a joy to use specific better/superior options for your software/service needs as per your specific choice!
Agreed. I'm learning Chinese and while apps are lovely, nothing will prepare you for the pure amount of variation in accents across the world. Real world immersion becomes important for your brain to get used to mapping certain sounds to certain words.
I've also realised it's same for English, except we don't really think about it since we're used to the sounds, but the way we'd say "I went to the market" in daily speech is night and day to how it would be enunciated during an English speaking class (e.g. uh wen tu-th markt vs eye weynt too thee marr-ket). To the unpracticed ear they can just sound like different sentences.
Never heard of Windscribe but their homepage has "Become American" as a feature.
> Are you sick of not having access to foreign oil? Do you love using advanced weapons to fuck up someone’s day? Obsessed with manipulating your financial records to make yourself look more successful than you are?
Yes, I've noticed their results are definitely becoming more opaque and driven by what they want to show you. (This is even when there isn't a sponsored option on the map.)
Yesterday I was having the same issues as the top commenter except I was having trouble getting Google to label various mountain peaks I had zoomed in on.
It would be nice if they'd fix the missing labels on roads, even at the highest zoom with no clutter. Likewise, highway speed limits that were changed over a year ago.
Personally, if I could stop working tomorrow I would. I have nothing against work, but I do feel that most jobs aren't particularly meaningful, and so they act as a pacifier that fills in our time so we don't need to confront the question of: what do we do with our time?
> I think if I could afford to retire tomorrow, I'd have no trouble keeping myself busy for the rest of my life.
Completely agreed. I took 6 weeks off between jobs a couple years ago, the longest continuous span without work or school since I was 14. It seemed crazy long. My goal was to get bored so I'd be ready to go back to having a job at the end of it. I completely failed, I filled those 6 weeks and would eagerly have filled many more self-directed months. Maybe it'll be different when I'm older but right now, I could easily spend years and years keeping myself busy if I didn't have like bills and stuff to pay.
> but I do feel that most jobs aren't particularly meaningful, and so they act as a pacifier that fills in our time
For like 99% of people, work exists so they can buy a food and a roof over their head.
> the question of: what do we do with our time?
I've got a growing Steam library of games that I've bought but haven't gotten around to playing.
It always surprises me when people complain about being bored after retirement. If you've got disabilities or fading health so don't have the energy or ability to do the things you want, that's understandable. But I'll never understand the people that are able-bodied yet get bored only months into retirement. I just think...what did you do during your free time before you retired? Just stare at the TV?
Covid showed me that the daily ritual of getting up at the same time, getting dressed in proper clothes, and taking a train somewhere all massively helped my mood and level of willingness to engage with life.
I can see how, in the absence of responsibilities, it's easy to slowly slide into a rut and become a depressed lump of a human that doesn't want to do anything. I also see that as part of the challenge: how do I stay disciplined enough to be happy, without being dependent on a job to force me out of bed?
Opportunity cost and perspective. We've probably played enough games to know how the cycle goes; there's a little voice in our heads now telling us that it's all just a big pixel hunt and the next few hours will be more of the same (my interest in a game fades once I learn the meta). And then there's so many games these days... so the other question is why not play something more interesting or exciting?
I think that's it, when it's new you explore, but when you know what to expect or seen it before, exploration is no longer interesting.
That said, there's some games out there today that draw me in just as much as others did 25 years ago; I've spent hundreds of hours in Factorio, I can't imagine how much I'd be into it 25 years ago (...assuming I would have understood it back then). Likewise, I'm sure I'd be a lot more into Minecraft if I was 25 years younger.
Or use everything via the web browser; but yes, I think apps are the main reason we can't just have a generic Linux phone OS on an open hardware platform
Apps make or break operating systems and app stores. Just ask Microsoft (Windows Phone) or Huawei (HarmonyOs). IIRC amazon was paying devs to publish to their app store or something like that.
Thankfully, some apps have both web and native mobile versions but for a modern digital life, the critical apps are sadly not on both versions.
No. There are a few that claim to, but none of them are actually any good. Waydroid, for instance, requires that your kernel is compiled in basically "Android mode" (e.g. binder enabled).
> Waydroid, for instance, requires that your kernel is compiled in basically "Android mode" (e.g. binder enabled).
Waydroid needs you to have a single kernel module, which is in mainline Linux and just happens to be disabled in many desktop builds. That hardly makes it an "Android mode" kernel, and I certainly see no reason why it should make the system no good.
The title would make more sense as the default settings being "too low" since Low is the setting where when we trade off fidelity for speed, but "too high" has a nice ring to it.
reply