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> Is there nowhere in society considered sacred enough to not litter it with advertising filth? Yes, there is still a last bastion of focus, productivity and a

> Is there nowhere in society considered sacred enough to not litter it with advertising filth? Yes, there is still a last bastion of focus, productivity and anti-distraction. It's the terminal, which is why I find myself using TUI apps more and more as time goes on. There are specifically a few principles we need to preserve to prevent the marketers from ever getting a foothold in the terminal. They are: general computing, text-based UI, and composability. What that means is we need control over which programs we can run, we need to work with programs that view/input/output primarily text, and with programs that are modular (so that if a marketer injects their filth we can run it through grep and strip the filth out). In other words, our modern needs are not much different from the old UNIX philosophy. That is the technical remedy. From a sociocultural standpoint, though, the best way to avoid advertising is simply to be esoteric. Be interested in weird stuff which is too small to attract the interest of marketers and their filth.

zlg_codes 3y ago
Nice to see this sentiment on a mainstream site. :) There is some risk of ads on other protocols, but yes, text-based ones are the most flexible and powerful. Even if a gopher server starts getting ads, a gopher client can be configured to sed/grep/whatever certain URLs or domains, just like uBlock is for web browsers. Staying esoteric, and in self-hosted community spaces, is how I've best stayed away from corporate communications.
dumbo-octopus 3y ago
Funny you say that, I was just thinking earlier today back to the core-js drama. In short: the creator of a NPM package that is used by approximately everyone, everywhere, was facing a legal battle. He had been developing this package full time for years and did not have the cash on hand to hire a lawyer. He added a console log that ran on installing his package that said something like "If you're using core-js please consider donating". Queue an absolute shitstorm of people screaming at him in the GitHub issues and him eventually going to prison for around 10 months. It can be a rough world out there for the folks building for the "focus, productivity and anti-distraction" platform. Luckily he seems to be back on the grind nowadays, with a decently robust cross-platform donated slush fund to boot (~200k USD across Pateron, Open Collective, Bitcoin). https://github.com/zloirock/core-js https://github.com/zloirock/core-js
- benterix 3y ago
  > eventually going to prison for around 10 months Sorry, I don't follow: going to prison for what? I fail to see the connection between screams in Github issues and going to jail.
  - jsnell 3y ago
    He killed a teenager in a traffic accident, and needed money to settle with the victim's family to avoid going to jail.
    - PcChip 3y ago
      What a roller coaster of a story… that’s a minor detail that was left out though
      - dumbo-octopus 3y ago
        I said he was facing a legal battle in the opening. From what I can remember of his description of it, a teenager was lying down on a dark stretch of road at night and he ran them over in a motorcycle. Apparently one of the teenagers friends was trying to pull the other out of the road at the time? The details are shady and somewhat irrelevant.
ylee 3y ago
>Yes, there is still a last bastion of focus, productivity and anti-distraction. It's the terminal, which is why I find myself using TUI apps more and more as time goes on. Welcome to the club. I've been using Emacs for more than a quarter century, 99.9999% of the time text-only (whether Linux console, X terminal console, xterm, or SSH client) on a remote server. My email client is VM, written in Emacs Lisp. I've used it to read mail for almost as long as I've used Emacs. I tried Gnus a couple of times for Usenet but stayed with slrn because of Emacs's lack of multithreading. I've never tried Gnus for email because VM has always met my needs. VM (and ancillary tools, like Personality Crisis and mairix) * does a great of job displaying HTML messages. For the very few that it doesn't, one keystroke sends the message to my web browser running locally. * sends URLs I select (all from the keyboard) to the web browser * opens images and attachments * auto-adjusts the From: line of outgoing messages depending on the recipient * archives messages to various folders using various criteria * searches my archived mail going back a quarter century at lightning speed Of course, I can write Emacs Lisp code of my own to extend any or all of the above. VM isn't perfect. I'm sure that I could do all of the above with Gnus, and quite possibly am missing out on other features that VM lacks. Overall, though, I really feel like I have a superpower for email handling with it.
28304283409234 3y ago
Ubuntu spams the terminal: "Expanded Security Maintenance for Applications is not enabled. Enable ESM Apps to receive additional future security updates. See https://ubuntu.com/esm https://ubuntu.com/esm or run: sudo pro status"
- safety1st 3y ago
  They do and it proves the points I made in my prior comment. It's A) fairly non-intrusive because it's just text, and B) pretty easy to remove because Linux is a highly composable operating system where you're basically just pushing text files around.

zlg_codes 3y ago

Nice to see this sentiment on a mainstream site. :) There is some risk of ads on other protocols, but yes, text-based ones are the most flexible and powerful. Even if a gopher server starts getting ads, a gopher client can be configured to sed/grep/whatever certain URLs or domains, just like uBlock is for web browsers. Staying esoteric, and in self-hosted community spaces, is how I've best stayed away from corporate communications.

dumbo-octopus 3y ago

Funny you say that, I was just thinking earlier today back to the core-js drama. In short: the creator of a NPM package that is used by approximately everyone, everywhere, was facing a legal battle. He had been developing this package full time for years and did not have the cash on hand to hire a lawyer. He added a console log that ran on installing his package that said something like "If you're using core-js please consider donating". Queue an absolute shitstorm of people screaming at him in the GitHub issues and him eventually going to prison for around 10 months. It can be a rough world out there for the folks building for the "focus, productivity and anti-distraction" platform. Luckily he seems to be back on the grind nowadays, with a decently robust cross-platform donated slush fund to boot (~200k USD across Pateron, Open Collective, Bitcoin). https://github.com/zloirock/core-js https://github.com/zloirock/core-js

benterix 3y ago
> eventually going to prison for around 10 months Sorry, I don't follow: going to prison for what? I fail to see the connection between screams in Github issues and going to jail.
- jsnell 3y ago
  He killed a teenager in a traffic accident, and needed money to settle with the victim's family to avoid going to jail.
  - PcChip 3y ago
    What a roller coaster of a story… that’s a minor detail that was left out though
    - dumbo-octopus 3y ago
      I said he was facing a legal battle in the opening. From what I can remember of his description of it, a teenager was lying down on a dark stretch of road at night and he ran them over in a motorcycle. Apparently one of the teenagers friends was trying to pull the other out of the road at the time? The details are shady and somewhat irrelevant.

ylee 3y ago

>Yes, there is still a last bastion of focus, productivity and anti-distraction. It's the terminal, which is why I find myself using TUI apps more and more as time goes on. Welcome to the club. I've been using Emacs for more than a quarter century, 99.9999% of the time text-only (whether Linux console, X terminal console, xterm, or SSH client) on a remote server. My email client is VM, written in Emacs Lisp. I've used it to read mail for almost as long as I've used Emacs. I tried Gnus a couple of times for Usenet but stayed with slrn because of Emacs's lack of multithreading. I've never tried Gnus for email because VM has always met my needs. VM (and ancillary tools, like Personality Crisis and mairix) * does a great of job displaying HTML messages. For the very few that it doesn't, one keystroke sends the message to my web browser running locally. * sends URLs I select (all from the keyboard) to the web browser * opens images and attachments * auto-adjusts the From: line of outgoing messages depending on the recipient * archives messages to various folders using various criteria * searches my archived mail going back a quarter century at lightning speed Of course, I can write Emacs Lisp code of my own to extend any or all of the above. VM isn't perfect. I'm sure that I could do all of the above with Gnus, and quite possibly am missing out on other features that VM lacks. Overall, though, I really feel like I have a superpower for email handling with it.

28304283409234 3y ago

Ubuntu spams the terminal: "Expanded Security Maintenance for Applications is not enabled. Enable ESM Apps to receive additional future security updates. See https://ubuntu.com/esm https://ubuntu.com/esm or run: sudo pro status"

safety1st 3y ago
They do and it proves the points I made in my prior comment. It's A) fairly non-intrusive because it's just text, and B) pretty easy to remove because Linux is a highly composable operating system where you're basically just pushing text files around.