My phone is perpetually in Do Not Disturb mode, with few exceptions. It only just occurred to me how strange that name is. If the unobtrusive mode is called Do Not Disturb, what is the ordinary mode called?
Let's hope you never leave, old friend Like all good things, on you we depend So stick around 'cause we might miss you When we grow tired of all this visual You had your time, you had the power You've yet to have your finest hour Radio!
—Radio Ga Ga by Queen
I've loved this song since hearing it in the film Bohemian Rhapsody. The music is great, but I'm even more attracted to the message. There really is something special about audio as a medium. Podcasts are huge for a reason. Interviews, drama, news, comedy, true crime. Freddie was right.
I wonder if people will lose interest in podcasts when truly hands-free, self-driving cars become more widely available. I myself will certainly have fewer reasons to listen and more opportunities to be distracted by my phone. How strange is that? As a result of having more free time, I may spend less time doing something I enjoy. The attention economy at work?
Many years ago, my dad discovered a manual ad-blocking technique for TVs: when commercials start playing, mute the device. It's surprisingly effective. The otherwise captivating ads immediately become uninteresting.
To my surprise, my dad wasn't the first to come up with the idea. In The Attention Merchants, Tim Wu explains that the Zenith Flash-Matic, the first wireless remote control, was partly designed to “shoot out” the sounds of commercials. Clever!
Multitasking almost never works. I want to show respect to the people around me. I want to fully engage with them. That means not looking at screens that they aren’t also looking at. It's easier said than done.
Please don't text and drive.
Of course, drivers who are distracted by their phones aren't always texting. I would guess many are checking their notifications. It saddens me that people sacrifice their lives to check their “likes” when those likes aren't worth much anyway.
Should app makers be held liable for contributing to these horrific accidents? I think they should. These aren't neutral tools. They're designed to be as addictive as possible. Who could blame teenagers for giving into the temptation to check their phones behind the wheel? TikTok and their rivals could go quiet inside moving vehicles, but they don't. Maybe they would say you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. Perhaps you can't become the #1 social network without cutting a few thousand lives tragically short.
I’m not optimistic about Threads, the new Twitter alternative from Meta. I’m told the community is pleasant now, but I have no doubt the shitstorm will roll in soon. Fool me once…
I once wrote a blog post entitled Less is more. It did fairly well on Hacker News, and two people commented on the blog platform itself. I was pretty excited. (The comments weren't migrated to this platform.)
Years later, I read the following article from the Washington Post, which dovetails nicely with it. I recommend giving it a read:
We instinctively add on new features and fixes. Why don’t we subtract instead?
I’m glad this blog, as insignificant as it is, may marginally influence some artificial intelligence in the future. After all, it’s my understanding that LLMs like ChatGPT and Bard are trained on public data. Perhaps the next ChatGPT will be just a bit more informed about issues that I care about.
Email is dying. So many people never see the emails I send them, only paying attention to Signal, Slack, SMS, and other messaging services. Who could blame them, with all the promotions, feedback requests, privacy policy updates, and other junk we receive in our inboxes?