AND try to not use Google, Facebook, Amazon, OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Oracle and other similar products made by asshole companies.

Here's your boycott list:

* Android * All websites hosted on Google Cloud, Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure * All websites using React * Github

Life is tough. Good luck.

I don't know why you didn't include Apple on the list and why you use Meta's old company name.

Yes, these criminals have achieved quite a lot and it's hard to avoid them. I agree.

Apple is not that evil in my opinion compared to the rest. If I don't use Apple then they don't bother me.

I don't care about Facebook's rebranding. I'm allowed to call them what they are.

Honestly, at what point do we just throw our kit in the trash and go back to pen & paper?

Reintroducing pen and paper to your note-taking repertoire might not be such a bad idea, anyway -- it's a much more creative medium than most digital, textual forms.

It's extremely complicated to organize it, though

I suppose it's harder to cross-reference and find things, though I suspect you could utilize some sort of organizational system to mostly overcome that.

I really do think pen and paper will slowly regain prominence; I personally find that it can be much more liberating than digital media.

It's great to be able to use the page as a canvas, writing wherever you want, without having to meet the constraints of a text editor or the likes. Doodles help to visualize and understand problems, too.

Tangent for macOS is my current go-to for note-taking, and it works quite well: it's mostly just a Markdown editor, a tree structure of folders (which is really just a normal folder), and the ability to cross-reference and embed images.

I suppose the primary problem of note-taking apps is that they sort of have to be opinionated in some way to be useful (that's been my experience, anyway.) Markdown files are also guilty of this: they constrain you to a certain layout, which can either be a negative or a positive. Anything too complicated can be off-putting, whilst anything too simplistic can also be limiting.

It's a surprisingly complex field, and it could explain why there's so many different apps for it.

What is complicated about organizing written notes?

No search, no making space in an existing page, no moving text around, cumbersome to take it with you everywhere, unlike a phone.

You don't really need most of this, or it can be solved simply by thinking and remembering.

By that logic you don't really need paper notes either.

Not complicated, but many people have never learned how to do it or developed a system.

A similar life hack is the next time you have to give a presentation, you know, what is normally a brain numbing powerpoint slide deck sort of thing, rehearse and do the slides live on a chalkboard. The novelty of the spectacle means people will actually pay attention. Whiteboards are ok but really lack that visceral staccato punctuation that a chalkboard brings to the table.

Yesterday. Do we actually need any of this stuff? Probably not. But it's damn hard to stop enjoying it.

The moment you are reading this is not only peak digital trash, but also peak digital treasure!

That is up to you but I don't see why. Just ignore whatever these entities do, run you free OS with your free software when and how you want it and 'your kit' is yours without interference by hostile entities. You won't be able to access much of what those entities put out there but that doesn't matter once you realise their offerings aren't worth their cost.

The 'net is a big place with a lot of things going on. Drop the hostile actors and it is still a big place with a lot of things going on. The only problem you might encounter is once created by authorities which insist on you interacting with them through those hostile entities. I have thus far managed to use their applications - Swedish BankID and Dutch DigiD being the main ones - without needing to resort to any hostile entities - no Google accounts or Google services on my devices yet everything still works once I get rid of the nag screens telling me things won't work without the aforementioned.

In short, drop hostile entities and keep 'your kit'.

Never, because you have to pay for pen an paper, and the most reliable way to determine what the internet will favor is simply "Does it cost money or show me ads". That is literally as deep as the internets interest goes.

Did you forget the biggest asshole, Mr Apple?

In what universe? Apple is by far the most consumer friendly big tech company.

Sarcasm?

Not in the slightest. Who do you believe works more for consumer privacy and security? Meta? Google? Microsoft?

There are no megacorps that care about your privacy. Regarding Apple, see these:

Apple fined $8.5M for illegally collecting iPhone owners' data for ads (gizmodo.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34299433

Keeping your data from Apple is harder than expected (aalto.fi)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39927657

Apple silently uploads your passwords and keeps them (lapcatsoftware.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42014588

Watchdog ponders why Apple doesn't apply its strict app tracking rules to itself (theregister.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43047952

Apple memory holed its broken promise for an OCSP opt-out (lapcatsoftware.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41184153

Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS (therecord.media) [but Apple still collects a lot!]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639261

Oh, come on. What a bunch of scare mongering crap. Yes, if you tell Apple to store something on iCloud it...stores it on iCloud.

That your examples are rather weak proves my point, not the opposite.

I agree that these problems are less outrageous than those for Google, but my links show much more than simply storing things on iCloud.

Nah. One step at a time. That's the end goal, but by throwing everything all at once it's too easy to tell yourself it can't be done; so start with the worst offenders.

Those ARE the worst offenders. And you can easily avoid 80% off that list.

Do you have a filter list that you use to block all of their domains, and their cloud offerings like AWS?

I’ve had quite a few issues with Firefox crashing or otherwise behaving poorly in recent years.

Switched over to Brave and have had perhaps a day or two of failed ad blocking on YT. Otherwise it’s been a rock solid experience and the built in Tor is nice when I need to quickly test geo rules.