@Tattie I think one of the reasons I never really got into retrocomputing - despite nerding out with a C64 or an Amiga sure did feel a lot more fun than computing in the current day - is that what made it feel so great back then was that it felt like I could just make out the contours of the future, and it looked like it would be amazing. So much creativity waiting to be unlocked! We'd make kinds of art not even conceived yet! We'd be making wonderful discoveries!

Now I live in that future, and it fucking sucks. The fruit of all those great discoveries have turned out to be mostly figuring out new ways to spy on people and manipulate them - and now, to declare all-out war against even the concept of human creativity. My C64 still runs (I no longer have a working Amiga), but playing around with it won't bring back that feeling of a promised future of wonders - all I see is that it turned out to become a present full of horrors instead.

I'm sure part of all this - from a purely personal perspective - is just that I've hit the point where I'm supposed to be having my regularly-scheduled midlife crisis. "Did I waste my entire life?" sure does feel to fit the stereotype. I've thought about trying to retrain to do something else, but I honestly have no idea what that could even be. I'm disabled, I'm getting old, and there's not a whole lot I can do that anyone would want to pay me for that isn't related to software development. (I'm currently an embedded dev; prior to that I taught CS at a community college for ten years.)

@Tattie "Don't tell me what to do, old man!"

@Tattie It sucks. It's one of many things that has me considering getting out of the field I've otherwise spent most of my life on. I got into computers and programming as a tiny kid, but there's so little joy left in computing (and AI companies are doing everything they can to destroy what little is left) that at this point I find myself fantasizing about sending a message back in time, whispering into the ear of that little boy I once was: "Psst. Computers should just be toys. You'll probably be much happier if you focus on ancient history or reptile biology instead! See you in 40 years; hope you don't get as miserable as I became!".

@Tattie I'm pretty sure I'd be *especially* vulnerable to all the kinds of psychological damage LLMs can cause. I have OCD. I spent the last decade painfully learning that an ML recommender system can't tell the difference between someone who's developed a cool new interest and someone who's in the grip of a terrible bout of compulsive behaviour. Using the internet *amplified* my illness.

I've seen LLM chatbot use do the same thing to apparently healthy people; I don't even want to think about what it could do to me.

@ajroach42 I live in Denmark. It is very hard to get by in daily life without an Android or Apple device. I tried, for many years, until my current employer gave me a work phone (which runs Android).

There is an ubiquitous payment app that has largely replaced cash. It won't run on anything but an Apple or Android device.

If you use public transit (which I do), you can currently use a plastic card with readers mounted in buses, trains and stations. But this will be phased out next year and replaced with an app that only runs on Apple or Android devices. You will effectively no longer be able to use public transit unless you own an Apple or Android device.

There is a national authentication system (used by banks, public authorities, etc.) which *can* currently be used with a little token you can have in your pocket (one which displays numbers, and one which reads them aloud, for blind citizens) ... but you can't set it up without using an Apple or Android device. There have been talks about phasing out the code tokens entirely, so the only option to authenticate yourself with public authorities requires owning an Apple or Android device.

And all of this won't run on eg. a Fairphone with elementaryOS, because all the Android versions use Google's "authenticity verification" features, effectively locking out anything not fully controlled by Google.

It feels like living in a kind of digital vassal state fully colonized by two foreign tech giants.