Thoughts Of A Guy Named Mason

Digital Declutter

Anyone who has read my past few blog posts knows I have started reading Digital Minimalism by Carl Newport. The concept of a digital declutter is very full on, I am going to take a different aproach to doing something similar. Rather than a month long detox of optional technologies and then an assesment of whether they are needed. I am going to trust my own intuition about when something does not support my values or isn't an efficient way to accomplish a task. To start with I am going to list every optional technology in my life.

I think an important distinction to make is what exactly an optional technology is. In Carl's book he describes it as a peice of technology that you do not need to be reliant on in daily life. This would exclude the technology I use at school or at work. And exclude whatsapp and my works rostering app because i need those for work.

Most of my optional technologies do serve a purpose and serve it well. Things like SMS and my watch and my music collection and bluetooth headphones are excellent at doing what they do. The purpose of me having bearblog is to allow myself a place to write that isnt behind closed doors. From my list of optional technologies I am going to pull out everything that I don't feel does the best job at its task.

Lets tackle the first group; Youtube and streaming services. I am going to split this into 2 categories. Streaming services that collect data about me, and ones that dont. The first holds netflix, disney + and youtube. And the second holds Floatplane. I believe that floatplane does an excellent job at providing a place to watch content from a few select creators I watch everything from without ads and without sponsor segments.

However Youtube, Netflix and Disney + are a different question. I spend a lot of time watching Youtube... Time that I could also just do something different because I am not watching anything of substance, However blocking out youtube entirely would also block my access to video creators that aren't on an alternative subscription based platform, or where I don't feel the cost of that platform is worth it to me. My solution is that I can watch youtube but I have an extention installed to block the home page and any other video recomendations. So I only watch the few creators I have put in my bookmarks, I am just trying this idea out now and I have no idea how well it will work, but we can see.

On Netflix and Disney + I watch... Brooklyn 99 and the Artful Dogder... so a collection 35 dollars a month is not an efficient way to watch these 2 shows, however, I'm not the one paying for it. So I won't be doing anything about these 2 despite not liking the companies operating them, because I already use the services very little.

Instagram and Facebook. I have facebook so i can look at facebook marketplace, I don't have the app and I have facebook marketplace bookmarked so I never have to see the AI slop it is trying to push me when I just want to see if someone is selling someting nearby. Instagram I have to show some of my photography... I haven't used it since November last year... I'll just leave it for now.

And my gaming laptop is not the best way for me to play video games. Because it is slower than I would like and runs windows 11 which is also slower than I would like and has ads in the start menu.. I am saving for a steam deck because I think that will be a much better way for me to play video games without having to use windows. Once I get that I might setup the laptop as a server or something and run a local LLM.

Chatgpt is terribly dumb for anything detailed and I know it is tracking everything. So for the purpose of getting a natural language response from my own natural language input. It is a fair bit overkill, esspecially when the only difference I can find between it and an 8B parameter local LLM is that the local one cannot access the internet and takes a minute to load its response. However that time is on my laptop with a mid range 6 year old cpu in it. My gaming laptop has an entry level 7 year old gpu in it so maybe it will be faster.