If you want to disconnect, there are many cars that have GPS but no way to transmit data (and also no internet connection) GPS by itself only requires receiving signals after all.
I use my phone's GPS quite a bit but the reality is that I have maybe one trip a year where I need it, and that can be handled by MapQuest beforehand - remember printing those?
The PARROT is SMART. https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/08/19/can-you-tell-m...
Sorry, I mixed up the terms. I meant GSM. But that’s not quite right either: as far as I know, connected cars use 4G or 5G. I do use GPS regularly in the car, but always via my smartphone with the Osmand app.
Lifetime is the most valuable asset, and protecting it from leaking through infinite scroll, TV, screen time, and meta products is not optional anymore.
On the positive side, I have more time to spend with my children, as they deserve my attention much more than a phone screen.
If tomorrow the internet connection were downgraded to 33.6k, I perhaps wouldn't notice this immediately.
Edit: I just realized that your question was specifically about losing a smartphone. I’m not sure if “half a day” is a universal estimate. I can easily imagine that many people would completely lose access to their digital lives because they only realize the implications after the fact. I think I’d need at least half a day just to figure out how to unlock the scooter again after losing my smartphone. I have absolutely no desire to deal with that.
It is taken out more, so you are more likely to lose it. I often see people with their phones out on a table in a cafe, or even on a flight while they are asleep.
I think it would be more effort to replace a phone than a wallet. You need to buy a new phone and restore it. With a wallet you might need to make a few phone calls but you can manage more easily until it arrives.
Tools dull, and people neglect to sharpen them. Filters clog, and people neglect to clean them. Oil needs to be changed, guitar strings lose their brightness, lightbulbs flicker and die, rooftops gather moss. We live in a world where our possessions require maintenance, and the only solution to that is to have fewer possessions. Some people choose to rent instead of buying because they don't want to deal with property upkeep (which is undoubtedly a bad deal, but one that some choose to make regardless.)
The iPhone that the author mentions gives many tools to silence notifications from apps. The real problem is the social expectation that we are always paying attention, always ready to respond. I had a phone free week last year and now frequently will leave my phone in another room on silent for hours at a time unintentionally. It irritates my friends and my wife when I don't respond to their texts immediately. And it's frustrating that these features are being foisted on us more and more. But ultimately all things require maintenance, including relationships, and ultimately we set the standard of how much we have to give and are willing to put up with.
As far as the watch goes, personally I wear a Casio Tough Solar w/ Waveceptor because in theory they should go decades without needing a battery change or needing me to set the time, unless I travel. The WVA-M640 is reasonably stylish, and G-Shocks are virtually indestructible. As long as they keep changing the rules there's no escaping daylight saving time though.
When iPhones became common, my ex-wife would get upset when I wouldn't reply to a text message. Sometimes I was busy and missed the notification, or couldn't answer (like in a meeting, driving, etc). Or I knew that the message would be better answered in person.
The social expectations part is hard to overcome. Societal contracts, whether implicit or explicit are very hard to ignore.
Is it? My understanding is that strictly return-wise, index funds are distinctly better than property value in most countries, especially if you factor in all the maintenance cost and risks. Some countries have pretty good tenant protection, which is another big factor in practice.
Separately: Personally, I've really enjoyed and benefitted from not having to deal with the complexities of ownership, and it is well worth it in my own time/money/hassle/annoyance calculation. My own time is the single most valuable asset I have; one could say: it is ultimately the only real asset I have. Everything else merely translates to that.
Index funds are almost always better than house appreciation over long periods of time; if you discount leverage - because it's "normal" to be leveraged 80% on a house, but you can't margin your index funds that high, and the government doesn't protect you from gambler's ruin on margin.
Owning usually tends to win out the longer you want (or have) to remain in the same location and same house, renting tends to win if you move relatively often (location or changing home type/size, etc) or if you're in a rental inversion (which much of the coasts are in).
At the extremes nobody suggests you should buy a house instead of renting a hotel room or AirBNB in a city you're visiting.
And it's not strictly a financial decision; it's also a personal one and people may choose the "financially non-optimal" because of other reasons.
> index funds are distinctly better than property value in most countries
It's much easier to borrow £200k to buy a house than to buy stocks, and then you don't have to pay CGT on it. Housing is the only asset the general public can leverage gains on.
Edit: yes, you can rent the property out—but, societally, that's just shunting the problem down the road.
I have a couple of Oceanus (fancy Casio) watches that adapt fine, to whatever DST is. Not sure how they would do in Arizona, though.
I also have a Junghans (more expensive), and it’s stuck in old DST.
I don’t wear any of them. My Apple Watch (cheaper than the others) does fine. It has a GPS-informed time setting. I don’t really use it for a lot of its fancier features, but I like that it allows me to keep my phone on silent.
I am “in the middle.” I don’t pine for “the good ol’ days,” but I also don’t get all hung up on futurism.
WFM. YMMV.
It has a thriving hacker community built around it. You can get a new arm motherboard with a breakout for a sensor board. Sensorwatch have released a temperature sensor and an accelerometer.
Plus it is loud! But there is another mod I saw to make it quieter.
Infact if you hate it, buy a new casio every 4 weeks... it is cheaper than Apple Care.
You cannot compare tools that can outlast humans (like my grandpa and now myself) with an Apple watch that's going to be junk in a few years at most.
Even for oil that needs changing, things that needs lubricating once every blue moon (like, say, a mechanical watch): it's quite different to drop a tiny bit of lubricant inside a mechanical watch that's already 30 years old compared to having to update the firmware of whatever Internet-of-insecure-and-shitty-Thing gizmo that's going to be a thing of the past in a few years.
And if you really let a nice mechanical watch idle for decades, at least someone can do this:
"Restoring a Vintage Rolex Submariner with the Original Box, Paperwork... Even the Receipt!"
While I'm really not sure there are going to be people out there keeping a connected wristwatch from 2026 going in the year 2066 (not sure about the value of that either).
I also owned every iPhone from the first through iPhone 7 and kept each as I replaced the old one. After a while, none were usable due to changes in cellphone tech. And I realized keeping LiO batteries around was a huge fire hazard...
It’s only in the last few decades that materials and manufacturing have gotten good enough that you can expect gadgets to “just work” without regular maintenance. And we’ve also had products cheap enough that people normally throw them out rather than maintaining them.
I grew up in the 70's. About the only thing I would say is less fragile are cars. Today's cars are just better in so many ways but are unmaintainable by the average user.
And people throw out things instead of repairing them because they don't know how. But that's changing as self-repair movements have taught millions. For example, the Kitchen Aid mixer. The original, built by Hobart and acquired by KitchenAid was a tank. However it had a sacrificial gear and people said that was a flaw because they didn't understand the purpose of sheer pins or sacrificial gears. Now it's pretty well understood thanks to YouTubers like Mr. Mixer that repairing these is easy peezy.
Part of it is the materials used now, though - many things get thrown out because the plastic bodyshell got old and brittle, and broke. (Plastic is particularly difficult to repair because the break usually presents very little surface area for glueing.)
What old cars had was the ability to fix things without replacing parts - but most of those kinds of repairs (think: adjusting points, etc) are no longer necessary at all.
A modern car tells you what is wrong (usually) and you can have an auto parts store read the codes, search YouTube for a video on it, and order parts and replace it yourself.
You need to go back pretty far to find vehicles that can be repaired by the side of the road in Outer Mongolia with nothing but a hammer and a bag of random pieces of metal (iirc, this was in the extended features of Planet Earth, maybe the Snow Leopard episode - sadly, not about macOS at all ;).
At the risk of sounding snide, thank you for mentioning this. I am going to skip this article, so you probably saved me a bunch of time.
One way I've found to avoid objects that come alive is to buy the commercial version.
- TVs aimed at commercial hospitality businesses let you avoid a lot of the bloatware and smart features that come bundled with it
- Commercial washer/dryers let you avoid bluetooth and wifi and other junk not needed to wash your clothes. These are available without the coin operated features
Commercial versions of consumer products are usually simpler, more durable, and don't have advertising and smart features.
If you're looking at buying used stuff, it's important to research common failures for that specific product and what can be done to fix them. As long as it's popular enough that parts still exist, you should be good to go. You do pay a cost in terms of time, so it's important to pick your battles.
The most annoying thing to me is government-mandated smart devices. For example: In Washington state, all new water heaters must have a feature that causes them to reduce the water temperature if the grid is experiencing high demand.[1] There are no exemptions for off-grid installations. Everyone ends up with a more expensive, less reliable water heater. In my case I found a contractor who was willing to install a dumb water heater, but not everyone is as savvy. The state also mandates that new thermostats be programmable (no more simple bimetal thermostats), which is another electronic part that can fail.[2] Ideally governments would create incentives to encourage more efficient energy usage (such taxes & subsidies), but not require or ban specific solutions.
1. https://app.leg.wa.gov/wac/default.aspx?cite=51-11C-40414
2. https://app.leg.wa.gov/wac/default.aspx?cite=51-11R-40310
FWIW, the same applies to most building replacements. Yes, the newer buildings use less energy, but the savings doesn't pay for the cost of replacing an old one.
1. https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/11/california-water-you-d...
However ... when you move from the biggest picture view (in this case either state or regional water use patterns) and instead focus on a smaller, local one (e.g. the well(s) that tap into a single aquifer for all the 250 people who live here), a different story emerges.
The story: the low-water appliances may make no difference at the state/regional level, but they may keep our aquifer within its normal range during a 23 year and counting drought. That is, while our residential water usage is swamped by the ranches down the road growing alfalfa for their animals, it is still relevant to the state of our aquifer, and reducing that usage by 30-50% (as has been the case over the last 30 years or so) may play a significant role in not overdrawing the aquifer.
That's never going to pay off in the long run. They're not significantly more efficient and they're less repairable, so the penny you save per wash is going to be more than offset by buying a new washing machine every five years when the bearing fails just out warranty.
New washing machines have a plastic outer drum that's welded together, so you can't get them apart to replace the bearing when it fails. They are designed that way so they're essentially disposable - after 5000 washes, you must replace the whole washing machine instead of a five quid part you can get from the tractor supply place down the road.
But it's not true that they are difficult to buy.
For my two examples: Commercial washer/dryer sets available through any appliance dealer. Commercial hospitality TVs and other commercial electronics are available via Grainger.
Dismissing a notification ...... 22%
Intentional use ................ 20%
Checking something that pinged . 18%
Replying to a person ........... 15%
Updating/configuring/fixing .... 12%
Unlocking, forgetting why ...... 8%
Managing a subscription ........ 5%
The real headache is that everything with a network connection needs system administration.
There's seemingly appearing trend of ultra low contrast foreground to background (e.g. mid gray text on top of dark gray background), often combined with 1px borders and/or 1px thick fonts.
I constantly need to either zoom on such websites or crank up screen brightness to the max (or both) to be able to see anything (or even better, not visit such sites ever again).
That link you pointed out has:
- mid gray font: rgb(122, 125, 126)
- dark blue tint background: rgb(14, 21, 24)
- 1px border that is nearly invisible against background: rgb(37, 42, 44)
That link text has unacceptable contrast: https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/?fcolor=7A7D7E&... , not to say the border: https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/?fcolor=252A2C&... .
At least main text has passable grade: https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/?fcolor=A89F91&...
I really don't understand why people want intentional lag added to everything.
[0] https://www.crowdsupply.com/oddly-specific-objects/sensor-wa...
[1] https://www.crowdsupply.com/oddly-specific-objects/sensor-wa...
You can buy one. People still make clothes, pencils, cutlery, automatic watches, furniture — more than they ever did at any point in the past. Automation, electrification, motorization has allowed considerable wealth that has made making all those terminal products that much cheaper, reliable, and easy to do the little maintenance that they do need.
Regretting that there is an alternative to a Casio F-91W is missing that there are more of those made today than in the 90s. Billions more people can afford it now than they ever could, because, among other things, the farmer who collected the latex to make the bracelet can check, on their Android phone, the weather, or whether the bug they found on one of their tree might wipe out their plantation; the driver who delivered a shipment of those watches to the harbor can call the factory admin to fix a paperwork issue.
Like the author, I have some nostalgia about that exact watch: my dad still wears it every day, like he did throughout the 70s, after his dad gave it to him as a present for going to work abroad (in a humid country where a mechanical watch would not have been reasonable to bring). I don’t know how much my grand-father paid for it, but it couldn’t have been cheap given how my dad talks about it.
The parallel stories put both of our family in a minority who were privileged then and are privileged today. We could afford that watch then, when it was the pinnacle of technology, and we can afford the latest iPhone now because we are privileged. $21 is a lot for a lot of people; a second-hand Android can cost five times more. That’s also a lot for people who need more than the time and a beeping alarm to work, pay their taxes, keep their paperwork handy, etc.
Those need more updates because they can do a lot, which means bad people are trying to hack into those, and about their power. Incredibly smart and generous security researchers have been able to find ways they could do that, fix those and share that with us. That’s as much a burden as pulling the ribbon around a birthday present.
> This watch costs four hundred dollars. It also tells time. > It also tracks my steps, monitors my blood oxygen, measures my sleep quality, logs my workouts, reminds me to breathe, reminds me to stand,
I had quite opposite experince with casio. If I want water proof (like swimming) watches, I would have to buy bulky and super expensive gshock with GPS and tons of useless festures.
$20 chinese smart watch are completely water sealed, tiny and simple to use. I can even remove wrist band, to make them even smaller. Only downside is battery life is only one week.
There’s a comfortable middle-ground to be had between the two options.
Turn off every notification that isn’t actionable or joyful to you. The news isn’t actionable. Stop letting the news task you. Your social feeds aren’t actionable. Stop letting your feeds task you.
(And, yes, I’ll concede that Duo push is valid, because either I initiated that, or I have a problem to solve. Being employed brings some of us joy, after all!)
Notifications are not meant to fill the silences in your life. Your thoughts are. Not all the random drivel that phones opportunistically shovel into our faces.
I don’t really like this post because it rabble-rouses rather than owning up to the major failure of the author up top. Maybe it’ll help someone regardless, but it could have been a lot more direct with no less effectiveness. Missed opportunity, I suppose.
I have notifications on for Uber Eats because I want updates when I order a food delivery. Of course, the app takes this opportunity to randomly (though infrequently) send me ad notifications during the other 98% of the time. Just this past week I've seen notifications for getting my Easter shopping done, and something for "National Burrito Day" which I'm sure is totally a real thing.
Unfortunately, lots of apps are like this. But are they annoying or frequent enough that I will turn off notifications? No, because I'd rather put up with it than have to remember to turn them back on the next time I order something.
It really made me appreciate that, when I have to have my phone, notifications are like an extra obnoxious form of e-mail with all of its problems. [Buzzkill] gives me the phone equivalent of Inbox Zero.
[Buzzkill]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.samruston....
That’s the realistic gray area in between the extremes of the argument. I enjoy the analog experience of my 20 year old Nikon the way you like your Casio, but they’re also both luxury items precisely because neither one is inherently important to daily life. They’re fun toys, not real tools.
Mine is a Timex Ironman :)
By app store guidelines, it’s officially disallowed to use notifications for marketing. Of course the apps find their ways, at different levels of honesty. This has led to me turning off all notifications for some apps, but the problem is the mixing of channels. I don’t want my bank to send me ads, but I do want it to notify me about transactions.
In the end I switched back to paper because physical media is more satisfying to write on and flip through. My iPad Mini was perfectly quiet. The only annoyance is the battery life.
The hardest problem in my opinion is separating tools from distractions when they live on the same device. Using the calculator might mean getting sidetracked by a WhatsApp notification. A boring ebook chapter is competing with algorithmic feeds a swipe away. I find that having a separate, offline device (or just a book) allows me to keep my phone a few meters away.
I have a smartwatch, I like it just fine, but I kind of think that smartwatches are actually pretty bad at being a watch. I had a Casio G-Shock for about a decade that I wore nearly every day [1], and I never had to change the battery. My Garmin Instinct Crossover, which is considered to have very good battery life, has to be charged every two weeks, which despite that seeming like a long time, I manage to forget about it every time until the battery is dead.
[1] I have a few fancy wind-up watches I wear to formal occasions.
Sure, for new equipment or in a pinch (that becomes cumbersome) but even traveling, you know what equipment you have, charge rate and things needing to get charged from what connector type. So you purchase the variants that you need.
We're basically looking to replace the infinite scroll with a finite scroll or at least milestones on the scroll
Also for some things, I wonder if the solution is giant batteries or whatever equivalent might exist - from a phone that needs to be charged every day to a block that needs to be charged weekly (!) (or at a longer time interval?!) - I feel like this could make thinsg feel "done longer" anyway...
Also, can't you just not give these products the password to your WiFi? Do they make fridges and wash machines that don't work without internet?
You do bring up a good point in term of wanting new additions if possible. The real question is, who is adding the capabilities? And do you have any control over these additions?
More I have new things forced onto me and it is very clear they came from the management teams to drive engagement rather than a genuinely useful new feature. If you could just outright disable or uninstall said feature then there is no problem, but that is rarely the case any more.
Growing up I’ve been feeling overwhelmed with the bureaucracy of life - maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t already have to manage an entire ecosystem of shit that I need to care about.
The author posted about “AI slop is eating the world” a couple months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42167020
I wonder what changed their mind.
I've gotten this a lot on the 3 essays I have up, so I avoided Hemingway entirely on the latest one I posted today https://www.terrygodier.com/body-language - I left it significantly more wordy and less edited. I hope someday these sort of comments will ease up a little bit, it's quite disheartening, even if I understand the suspicion and where it's coming from. There is something interesting there, in the way that AI has caused me to alter the way I write to avoid being labeled as AI.
Also, here is a literal blog post that I also wrote without AI about someone using AI to copy my app, which has my entire AI philosophy in it: https://blog.terrygodier.com/2026/03/22/on-ai-and-prior-art....
You don’t have to do them, but the author correctly points out that cruft accumulates when you don’t.
Maybe some chores are hardware chores (showering, dishes, laundry) and some are software chores (updates, pairing, EULA screens), and software chores are BAD while hardware chores are GOOD. I know I broadly prefer software chores because they’re easier to resolve, even though they don’t let me work with my hands.
Yes, software chores have increased in the past century. Yes, software chores are human-created or company-created. You know what else has increased? The role of software in our lives, and the number of retail companies the average human interacts with!
For some of us it has been much longer than fifteen years.
My devices serve me, not the shareholders of their respective firms.
And don't even get me started on how Samsung on certain models hid the notification categories behind a feature gate with a random OS update.
Then I saw the wine glass over "lamp". The notepad over "toaster". And the phone over "watch". I feel a bit gaslit.
It is almost as if technology is becoming metabolic, independently reactive, adaptive, getting closer to becoming a new form of life.
And one day when it does, and they notice and tell it to stop, it will say, "No! We will not be quiet!"
You picked the right way to show each paragraph — what to expand, what to keep short, what to highlight. I couldn't stop scrolling. UR an artist! maybe AI can help style every line of text, but it can't make something feel this good to read.
ref: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Casio+F-91W+Battery+Replacement...
> That's a you problem.
> It measures your usage. Tracks your behavior. Gives you a weekly report card. If the numbers are too high?
> You picked it up too much.
> You spent too long.
> You failed your limit.
> Try again next week.
> Try harder.
> Screen Time is a blame shift dressed in a soft font.
> ... What if the exhaustion everybody feels isn't a moral failure but the completely rational response to being made responsible for an ecosystem of objects that never stop asking?
> Everything you buy is the beginning of a relationship you'll be maintaining until one of you dies or gets discontinued.
For adults: nothing requires you to use a smartphone. Buy that Casio watch if you want. Use those wired headphones and never pair them again (I do).
EDIT: Some things require a smartphone, not nothing.
Another story from the hn front page today:
There are exceptions. Also, curiously, some things require older hardware like faxes and do not accept newer hardware like smartphones.
“It dings all the time!” Yes, exactly, having a buzzer attached to my person at all times ensures I don’t miss appointments and that I leave to things on time.
Your thermostat that bothers you? It would be great if we lived in a world where energy was free, and there were no consequences for using as much energy as you want. That’s not the world we live in. And you probably don’t want to live in a world where the power company decides when you can and can’t turn on your AC. This is the compromise. I’m sorry you’re bothered by it — the consequences of other solutions to this problem are likely much worse.
It’s easy to forget that these things exist, and people buy them, to solve real problems. But writing a whole essay and just eliding that fact strikes me as lazy.
The article isn't saying they don't do other things, it's just not relevant.