This command curl wttr.in gives you the same information about the weather as a commercial website — without the privacy consent, without ads and videos. Commercial site are designed to dazzle us and overwhelm us and advertise to us. None of it is stuff that that we need. When we go on a weather website, we are after information about the weather.
Commercial social media platforms have every bad feature of commercial websites, plus they use algorithms to frustrate and annoy us into higher engagement.
In December of 2025, I came to the point of exhaustion. My interactions with the internet made me feel stressed, angry, helpless, or needy of a thing that I can buy. Emotionally, I was at the limit of how much internet I could take. It’s like being a drug addict who finds that his dose is already so high that it is no longer practical to increase, yet, due of habituation, feels chronically unwell without any increase.
A recent article suggests that because of the AI-induced RAM apocalypse, it is no longer practical to upgrade our hardware to appease RAM-greedy software, and yet, all modern software is RAM-greedy. The example given was that of the Windows task manager, whose memory requirement has increased by an order of magnitude without any commensurate gain in functionality. The article suggests that the next trend in computing be resource-appropriate: simple programs for simple needs. If we cannot afford to expand according to possibility, why not limit according to need?
The entire space program that sent men to the moon and back had less computational capacity than a single smartphone. Well, what have we accomplished with millions of these things?
I remember, as a teen-ager, being fascinated by computers. That fascination was nearly entirely about gaining mastery over computers — as opposed to today’s experience — computers gaining mastery over us. Although this admittedly is also fascinating, in a Hollywood kind of way.
Lessons from the Amish
The Amish have some strange practices, among which is their distrust of modern technology. And yet, their culture is thriving. If current population trends continue (which is unlikely) one-half of the US population would be Amish by the end of the century. That is worthy of reflection. At the end of the day, reality is based on who is here and who is not here; people who have the right lifestyle but who are not here, have no lifestyle. When the rest of us are fighting over canned food in urban rubble, the Amish will continue their way of life as they have always done.
There is an argument to be for simplicity. Perhaps it is the case that unlimited technology at any cost is not sustainable or even healthy. There could be a technology horizon, beyond which we need ever increasing technology to deal with the effects of technology. We already have CO2 extractors to deal with the climate effects of excess CO2 production. People are increasingly turning to AI for therapy while tech companies cultivate toxic on-line environments.
There are mental health costs to being chronically annoyed, there are cognition costs from constant streams of tiny bits of information. When more economic activity can be attributed to information than agriculture, techlords’ importance become disproportionately large; they transcend ordinary citizenship. They become the barons of our times. Now might be the moment to ask whether it is wise to mortgage the economy for computer candy — the consumption of which leads only to brain-rot and techno-peasantry.
The average person does not need average computers. Average needs are fulfilled by the lowest grade of computer technology currently available. As the case of the Amish show, we can strengthen our culture with less, not more, technology.
Subinternet
The internet of the nineties was a nicer internet because it lacked techno-bloat and the fact that it required a low level of technical competence to write web pages. Dangerously stupid people were not present. Can modern internet refugees, therefore, not look forward to a refuge protected by technical barriers? For example, mastodon is criticised for being too difficult to use because it requires users to choose a server in addition to a username and password. Is this not exactly the kind of “barrier” we would want?
If open source software is criticised for not being child-friendly, should adults not switch to open source software? Turn-key solutions from billionaires always arrive in a Trojan horse. It is rather in the interest of our mental well-being and competence that we deal with minor technical problems as a matter of course. We should be Ukrainians, at least in mind.
Virtues of text
I began wondering how far one can go with text. After all, it is information that we want from the internet. We want to be good inside our own minds, not raging helplessly at a broken world that fuels itself with rage.
The internet is fundamentally text. Web pages are written in html, servers are configured with text files, software is compiled from text files, databases are populated and administrated with text commands.
Text is never deprecated. There is no new version of text to upgrade to. There is no vendor lock-in. Text can be modified by any text editor.
Text is amenable to unix-grade search and replacement. sed and awk are so complex, books have literally been written about each. However, with the widespread availability of AI, the power of these commands falls within the reach of the modestly savvy user.
Of course, text alone is rarely sufficient. We need programs that understand what text they’re looking at, and which react appropriately. For example, it is possible to write text documents in markdown. **bold text** is rendered as bold text, E=mc^2 is rendered E=mc2, and so on.
There are spreadsheets like Libreoffice Calc, but did you know that text spreadsheets also exist? Cells automatically resize; rows and columns may be moved and deleted. These can be shared with others by any means to any platform because they are simple text.
|----------+-------+---------+------|
| Student | Maths | Physics | Mean |
|----------+-------+---------+------|
| Bertrand | 13 | 09 | 11 |
| Henri | 15 | 14 | 14.5 |
| Arnold | 17 | 13 | 15 |
|----------+-------+---------+------|
#+TBLFM: $4=vmean($2..$3)
Image and video manipulation is fundamentally visual, but many basic operations — like resizing, cropping, and text overlay — can be done from the command line. Where-ever the same operation must be done to a large number of files, this is the only practical method.
If you have ever gotten a download consisting of a video and audio file, there is a simple way to combine them without re-encoding: ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -i audio.wav -c copy output.mp4
Why you need a news reader
Much of the news cycle in 2025 was dominated by fascists making outlandish claims and telling obvious lies. These statements were not actually news — they were not events — but they did serve to annoy and outrage non-fascists. They served to wear them out. At some point, some of the less extreme statements slipped through without commentary. Whether or not this was the intended goal, this was the victory: The constant barrage of extreme claims, and the subsequent fatigue, served to normalise far-right speech.
It is the responsibility of your elected representatives to deal with these claims. You do not need to read them.
Putting a faucet on your news feed is therefore important for your mental well-being. Above is a screen-shot of a text-based news reader. Several news sources are listed on the left and their headlines for the day are listed in the upper right window. If you click on a headline, you get a terse summary in the lower right, along with a link to the full article. Consider this latex gloves for news.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence is seemingly an inevitable part of the future, but it does not necessarily mean handing over the future to AI Techlords. The first mitigation is to run local AIs. There are many AI models freely available, some of which require high-end gaming towers, but some run on laptops. The electricity has already been spent, the data already scraped. We can use these things at no further cost.
Naturally, these models are scaled-down versions of the ones we know from commercial websites like chatgpt.com. The low-end can run on laptops with 16Gb of memory, and are sufficient for the most basic queries and translations. Some models are specialised, for example, for image description, that allow them to work well, despite their small size. Above that are levels that require increasingly powerful gaming set-up, until we reach the highest level, which is beyond the reach of the ordinary consumers.
Or was. A recent development has made it possible to distribute the processing load of a high-end LLM across four networked PC equipped with consumer-grade hardware. In other words, any small business in a commercial space can host its own high-end AI for just the cost of electricity.
Home Servers
Most information is stored on commercial (cloud) servers because of commercial load and storage requirements. This means large capital investment and shareholder payouts. But an equivalent capability might be provide by many servers hosting small amounts of information. In the first place, no single person creates more unique content in his lifetime than he can host on a home server. A home server easily has enough capacity to store and distribute a hundred books, a hundred songs, and five hundred TikTok videos. For larger data sets, there are distributed storage solutions, like peer-to-peer file sharing (e.g. BitTorrent). Here, home servers can and do bear the load.
It used to be the case that managing a home server required a great deal of technical competence. However, cloud solutions like nextcloud are relatively easy to set up, or in the worst case, can be set up by activists. Perhaps it should indeed be a form of activism to promote and implement open source, spyware-free, and ad-free software.
Social Media
Social media is arguably a failed experiment. With the exception of senior citizens, social media undermines the mental well-being of its users. This is largely due to the algorithmic promotion of inflammatory — and sometimes false — information. No one bears such a daily pounding gracefully. In addition, the limited size of posts themselves have negative effects: it atrophies the concentration of users. It guarantees that nothing so original that it requires explanation gets posted. Social media is a vomitorium and buffet in one.
If social media had any positive use at all, it would be only to advertise thoughtful articles and essays hosted elsewhere. As it turns out, one can host a mastodon server at home, as well as a wordpress site. Billionaire control of social media serves no useful purpose that is not better served independently.
Entertainment
We do not need more movies. There are enough movies in existence for a lifetime of viewing. New movies seem to be either remakes of old movies or adaptations of printed works or cartoons. The latest trend is to use AI to write and produce movies and TV shows. This is hardly a solution; due to the nature of AI, this guarantees a recycling of existing material. In other words, there is no point to bemoaning the loss of new movies when genuinely new movies are not being made. Until it is possible to render movies on home computers, movies shall be a profit-making business and shall be constrained by what is profitable.
Even if commercial movies fail to inspire, they do affect the mind: If you have even a little bit of zen, you know that it is vulnerable to violent movies. They change your register. They push zen further away. Describing violent movies as “entertaining” is like describing rage-bait as “interesting.” It’s only true of a particular kind of person, and the more you watch, the more you become that kind.
There is no need to replace streaming services. Humanity can do better.
