Every so often, I'm reminded that the web is almost unusable without an ad blocker. I'm amazed anyone can tolerate it for more than 10 seconds.
Use an ad blocker.
I recommend AdGuard because it's thoughtfully designed. It has the user interface I've always wanted from an ad blocker, where the user can select broad categories of ads and annoyances to block or pick and choose from more specific filters, which are hidden by default. uBlock Origin is more popular with technologists, but I find its settings UI to be overwhelming.
I genuinely believe in supporting publishers, but not through modern advertising. If a website you like offers an ad-free experience for some price, consider paying for it. Otherwise, I think you're more than justified in using an ad blocker to protect yourself from the sludge being thrown at you. Doing so is arguably an ethical obligation. Online advertising has completely run amok, harming our privacy, our digital security, and our sanity. The attention economy it fuels has tremendously harmful downstream consequences—addiction, misinformation, political extremism—that threaten society at large.
I know I'm late to the party, but Cory Doctorow's essay on “enshittification” is brilliant.
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
“I want to leave the world better than I found it.”
I used to say that, but I've come to appreciate that many things are not within my control. Through no fault of my own and despite my best efforts, the world may very well worsen in the future. Society may be devastated by climate change, nuclear war, artificial intelligence, or social media. Would that be a personal failure? Of course not.
I later settled on alternative wording: I want to leave the world better than it would have been without me. Even that sometimes seems impossible, given my contributions to pollution and my consumption of limited resources, given the number of ants I've inadvertently stepped on, and so on. Still, it seems like a more reasonable goal.
I'm not sure where I heard this, but it beautifully summarizes an important issue:
Every explanation fits the past.
In other words, any theory can be molded to agree with previous observations. A theory's usefulness and validity depends more so on whether it can correctly guess what will happen in the future, whether it has predictive power.
edit (2026-01-30): Although I'm not certain, I vaguely remember the quote coming from Scott Adams, who was interviewed on a podcast I listen to. Scott Adams had some good ideas, lots of bad ones, some crazy beliefs, and some strange, unexplainable political allegiances. That doesn't make the observation any less valid. Life is messy.
Some time ago, I came up with a little mnemonic to remember how direction of travel affects flight times:
East to west, you'll need rest. West to east, not in the least.
That's right, flying eastbound is faster than flying westbound along a similar route. For example, flying from California to New York takes about 5 hours, but flying from New York to California takes about 6 hours. The difference is not caused by Earth's rotation, but rather the jet streams.
“We need to find a way back to reality, and the only way to do that is to have conversations that aren’t mediated by technology that is financed and animated by third parties who hope to persuade us. We must fight to speak to each other outside of the persuasion labyrinth.”
“We curate our lives around this perceived sense of perfection because we get rewarded in these short-term signals—hearts, likes, thumbs up—and we conflate that with value and we conflate it with truth, and instead, what it really is is fake, brittle popularity.”
—Chamath Palihapitiya, former VP of Growth, Mobile, and International at Facebook, in a conversation at Stanford
I'm intrigued by Boring Report, a news aggregator that uses artificial intelligence to offer “boring” coverage of current events, free of sensationalism and clickbait. As one example, it offered the following headline:
Shakira and Lewis Hamilton Spend Time Together in Miami
for an article originally titled:
Newly-single Shakira enjoys cosy boat trip with Lewis Hamilton just days after pair were spotted at secret dinner
It's not perfect, but I like it. Imagine if all news read this way. How much more normal would the world feel?