Excursions

I love USB C standard for charging - one cable at a fixed places charges everything throughout the day. My work and personal laptop, iPad, earphones, headphones, speaker. And my phone. Thank god i don’t use iPhone.

I have stopped using YouTube on my phone for quite some time now. Even my iPad and laptop, I use it very carefully. I do not like what it has become, especially the home page. Google’s aggressive recommendations and creator’s ability to game it have made it home to clickbaity and idiotic content.

Google wants to make YouTube addictive, and I want to fight back. Here’s the way that worked for me.

I either access the video directly (if I know what I want to watch) or browse my Subscriptions page (when I don’t know what to watch). The home page is useless without history turned on. And so are other recommendations. Trust me; you do not want them.

Well, Google has managed to ruin the subscriptions screen too.

As if the recommendations for sensational videos weren’t bad, Google found another way to spike engagement or our addiction to the app - shorts. I have been vocal about my dislike for this form of content.

What’s worse is that Google seems to be aggressively pushing it on creators, making it more profitable in some manner. Now my subscription page is full of short videos, with no way to filter them out.

The high-quality videos are getting lost in this drivel of mindless shorts, even from the creators I respect. I do not know how some of the most intelligent minds are ok with this. I have seen this play out to written words – the long-form essays are lost amidst the hot takes and rants on social timelines.

Google has done the same to the last sane space on the platform. I can now simply get rid of my usage of this platform altogether.

Congratulations, Google, and thank you!

Too much is said about how AI - ChatGPT & likes - is already challenging our being. Our personhood. But AI can learn from and build over only its training data.

What makes us human is we invent our own training data. As long as we keep the bulbs in our heads flashing, we have nothing to fear.

The weekly report from Digital Wellbeing on my phone informs me that the daily average screen time was 20 minutes less than last week’s. And I am pleased to see that trend has been downwards for the last few weeks. I uninstalled YouTube from my phone a few weeks back, which is one of the key reasons for lowered usage.

YouTube sucks away time without you noticing. The best way I know to control this beast is to not be available to you. The web app is a pain enough to not be distracting. So just get rid of the app from the phone and get your time back.

I never tried Matter enough, even though I like most of what I have seen and respect their goal. I just don’t want to start liking an app that will eventually cost me another monthly subscription. One that’s not cheap either at $8 per month.

I have been using Matter for the last couple of days. I don’t see the benefit yet, other than a different way of doing the same? Why and when should I use this reader app?

One of the problems with Twitter is that it became a lot bigger and important than just a fun social network. Like someone built a fun clicker to play with and others made it a switch that can trigger wars.

With a lack of any options for a minimalist phone in India, I am glad that Android allows custom launchers. I have stripped most distractions off my phone with one such option. I’ve managed to kill the subconscious “swipe-tap-launch” cycle for sure.

iPadOS, specifically its multi-tasking, must be Apple’s Achilles’ heel in making the iPad the default family computer. They attempt to improve its windowing capabilities significantly every iteration, only to further muddle it. What’s a Computer? It for sure is not an iPad yet.

I have never had the dark mode turned off since the option was made available on my devices. I did today. After an initial bout of pain, things don’t look too bad. Instead, they look cleaner. The whole experience - the platform, the apps, the websites - is so very different.

One thing is pretty apparent - all the interfaces look better in the light mode. As if the apps are designed for the light mode first. The setting, the interface elements, and the colour palette look ingrained. With the dark mode, all apps look the same – white text on limited shades of dark background. Maybe that is the reason many people prefer this mode. Irrespective of the app, it looks the same.

I don’t mind a diverse collection of interfaces. So against the wishes of the techie in me, I will extend this experiment for a bit longer on my smartphone. I will use it with the dark mode turned off. It can’t be too bad, right?