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Sep 22, 2022Liked by Max Read

Facebook is like Carthage. It becoming less menacing or dangerous is no reason not to—it creates the opportunity to do so. Destroying Facebook is a necessary performance that circumscribes and directs future action.

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💯💯💯

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re: archiving your life, I don’t wish you all the pain, but it makes me feel a little happy that I’m not alone with this problem. Notational Velocity! nvALT! Both last updated in 2011 and 2017, respectively :(

Does anyone else have a setup to recommend?

- Bookmarks: I relied on Pinboard for about a decade but recently it stopped archiving. Turns out the author was inactive for the past year or more (source: the author on HN). I know it still hums along for now, but I got spooked. I’ve started a migration to Raindrop.io — 6,000 tabs to sort through.

- Notes: the Pinboard-type company for notes is Standard Notes (https://standardnotes.com/). I love them! Open source software run as a service if you pay. Privacy-focused and committed to last. Also, forcing myself to keep all notes has upped my compliance.

- Files: any backup service that you pay for. I stopped using Dropbox in 2014, does anyone remember the “Drop Dropbox” campaign when they added Condoleezza Rice to their board? Just the fact that that was a thing makes me laugh. Such simpler times…

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I hadn't even realized that about Pinboard, fuck -- my archiving still works fine but reading through HN it's clear it's broken for a lot of people. (Looks like Maciej suggested that he's been distracted and is getting back to it six months ago? IDK: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30657065)

Standard Notes is a very cool company. The sad thing is that I can feel myself slowly and inexorably drawn toward a 360-degree locked-in Apple experience -- I use iCloud for redundancy and document sharing and Time Machine for backup; I will probably eventually transfer password management over to Apple/Keychain/Hide My Email. At some point it will be hard to fight convenience to move note-taking/list-making to Apple Notes...

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Re: getting locked in with Apple, I think it’s a rational choice. Apple will outlast Pinboard, and everything else too. And if it works good enough.

Apple would have been my first stop if I didn’t regularly use a desktop PC with the required Windows or Linux OS. Said another way, if Apple spent any effort to cater to gamers or even non-artist desktop users, I’d be all-in. I’d even try using Safari!

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Zuck seems like any wealthy person- horridly out of touch with the reality of the masses. He’s aimed for the top of the social strata with products that require extremely super high speed internet. Meanwhile, Tik Tok runs on the world’s worst internet and works well still for viewers with slow speeds because it only loads one user’s content at a time.

And there are still way more people on earth with terrible internet than folks with VR headsets. The Metaverse seems like more of a passion project than a profitable endeavor.

But I do personally really enjoy using my meta VR headset. And I think it could replace personal computers/laptops because you can have giant and multiple screens and a keyboard on a smaller device.

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So Meta will compete with Apple as the maker of a computer you wear and as an app dealer.

It’s like, what would iPhones be like if Apple controlled and owned all the iPhone apps’s content? That’s what Meta ultimately wants.

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