About what’s thrown at us – daily, and without our consent

Avram Piltch has an interesting article on Tom’s Hardware with the headline: “Get Off My Desktop! Windows Needs to Stop Showing Tabloid News“.

It reminded me a lot about when I first got an iPhone from my former employer – you couldn’t edit the news they threw at you in any way, unlike Google’s own Android Pixel phones where you could select which content not to be shown to you (they disabled that by now), just like Avram describes it about being in Windows here.

But what he probably doesn’t get is that this way, you’re only training the beast, feeding it with creating your own profile, which will inevitably lead to the fact that you’ll live in your own filter bubble over short or long.

But oh my, is he right about the embarrassingly stupidity of some of these “news”! Have you for instance tried to visit Youtube without being logged in into Google to have it filter things for you? It’s a real shame, often right-wing or dangerously close to conspiracy theorists, and from top to bottom really really bad. And we trust these same companies with developing anything “artificially intelligent”? If so, then I see no future for mankind; we’re doomed.

In his article, Avram tries to find and show some workarounds to the problem, but I think it’s those companies themselves – and their interests are far different from the average person’s, who has to live with the crap that they’re shoving up our screens. In my opinion, workarounds won’t help us much longer, the only way out of that is to get rid of Windows, and any kind of “social media”, or even more difficult, the quasi monopolist which Youtube has become by now. To even have to pay for an operating system whose makers do that to us is utterly insulting, isn’t it? So the best advice I can give to this is: break free from these self-inflicted chains, cancel Microsoft et al from your desks, and use something free (as in speech, and as in beer).

It was over 25 years ago now that I decided not to support a black box operating system anymore, as I called it at that time, and moved to a first (for me) version of Linux instead. My team lead at my employers’ at this time recommended to not focus on Linux but to try Solaris instead, so I learnt that as well – and got job offers simply through asking questions in some newsgroups (anyone remember those?). Both Suse and Red Hat were too commercially driven for my interests, so I’ve found better ones over time. Today? I currently live on the Gnome desktop of Debian stable, and my weather icon looks like this:

Date and weather in Gnome

And when I click on it, it looks like this:

Extended weather in the Gnome desktop

No ads. No distractions. Just peace of mind. And to friends, I would never recommend workarounds but only the best that I can think of.

Like always, thanks for reading.