Digital minimalism

Minimalism on the shoulders of node. Quite my humor.

This takes an oddly charitable view to Twitter and who runs it. It didn't just magically start promoting pro Hitler posts out of nowhere. But their main problem is that it wasn't "enlightening" or making them feel good?

I suspect the primary reason is that while Firefly allows you to tweet, and see other people's tweets, it is missing one central part of the X interface: The Algorithm™.

In particular, I suspect that in my time using the X interface, I fell into the following trap:

Again, the algorithm doesn't just magically become entrapping like this, it was deliberately programmed to be so.

This month there was a bounty (organized by Statuette; I contributed as one of the donors) to create local phone apps that try to make useful knowledge easily accessible offline.

As with the prepper projects that come out every once in a while, most of these are just Kiwix or Openstreetmaps with more marketing. I see that according to the linked bounty, people have already pledged $3000 in ethereum, to say nothing of token costs vibing up apps for it. This is ridiculous. Is there really anything gained from repackaging papers on cryptocurrency or human longevity?. If people really wanted to contribute to offline knowledge, they should donate to the people who make the upstream datasources accessible in the first place:

https://kiwix.org/en/donate/

https://supporting.openstreetmap.org/donate/

For example, a few years ago Kiwix worked with Stackoverflow, which apparently helped with the education of internet restricted prisoners. Of course, Stack Overflow is now effectively dead. And somehow I don't think there'll be much appetite for getting them local inference rigs running whatever the latest flavor of Kimi or GLM is...

The best apps, on the other hand, used some kind of semantic search to show the user a search result from the local database immediately, and then followed that up with a very small LLM writing a text answer. This gives actually-good answers in a very reasonable timeframe.

So...in the spirit of minimalism, development and runtime wise, why not just use the search on its own? I mean, the linked bounty states an upper limit of 12GB RAM and 50GB storage, which seems ridiculous to use an LLM for if you're searching a relatively small dataset (english wikipedia is about 120 GB for reference). There are still phones that have 4GB RAM, and I've run kiwix with basic search on an ancient potato PC, so I'm sure there's at least some room for innovation with plain and simple search there. Do you really need to consult five different sources on Svalbard's climate and send it through an LLM to summarize? Can't you just search Comaps for vegan restaurants? How will you even get reviews that aren't out of date without going online?

One of the linked apps advertises itself as being "Help in an emergency. 51 first-aid and safety guides, each with a recorded reading" alongside "answers can be wrong". Frankly, if you expect to be in a situation where you have to apply first aid...take first aid training. Or at least download a first aid guide PDF (I'm sure there are many) and read it through. No app can magically substitute for proper preparation. In an emergency you will be stressed, you won't know what to do, you might have blood all over your hands and be unable to type on your phone. Or your phone might be broken or out of charge.

As someone who reads often about internet censorship, and has an interest in bandwidth minimalism, I am pretty annoyed to see slop built off of non profit or volunteer work get all the attention and the default solution to be to just throw more AI at the problem. More things like technomancy search, please.

We need social media less than before, because you can talk to the bot for information instead (and for human connection, there's still the old-fashioned solution: going out and talking to people in real life).

I do meet people in real life, but unfortunately I can't be traveling to Taiwan, the USA, Canada, Singapore, Austria, and Switzerland. (Must be nice to have so much cryptocurrency to pay for it). So I kind of would prefer for the internet to remain a usable avenue for communicating across borders...

I've been playing a bit with using offpunk ...One reason is to make surfing the web a little less bloated, and another reason is because I'm testing out shifting my email workflow to terminal app (e.g. aerc, Neomutt, etc.), and trying to see how to use offpunk to render html email messages...but in essence to help me move forward on my digital minimalism journey. Now, while offpunk is really awesome, the cuts and annoyances that I've encountered trying to view web content have everything to do with the sad state of affairs of the greater web. So, i'm arriving at the point that some areas of the web (more so the "small/indie web) look just fine via offpunk, but other maybe some mainstream areas of the web are just not as salvageable, or the experience is soooo diluted, it causes me to then open firefox to see stuff.

With all thanks to @ploum for creating awesome offpunk, please don't take offense to my comments. The problem is not offpunk, rather the problem is the wider web, or what i should label the craposphere! lol :-D

I saw this post elsewhere and wanted to echo one of the criticisms I saw:
Having a social media aggregator is not "minimalist"... It's kind of the opposite once you push past the "ah yes! I only open one app!" Like.. Why do you have so many social media accounts in the first place (or any at all for that matter)? That's not very digital minimalism.