Comportamento

Man built an exclusionary pseudo Linux distro instead of going to therapy

I avoid giving stage time to weird people (in the bad sense) here at the Manual. I’m making an exception to link to a July post by DHH, the Danish co-founder of 37Signals (the company behind Basecamp), creator of Omarchy, and author of a blog full of wrong ideas about immigrants and non-white people.

He became the “men do [stupid and/or difficult thing] instead of therapy” meme. I mean, literally. This man built an exclusionary pseudo Linux distro instead of going to therapy. And he’s proud of it! It’s right there on his blog:

Something many people will encounter at some point in their lives. Studies have shown that exercise, for example, is a more effective treatment than talk therapy (and pharmaceuticals!) when dealing with such episodes. But I’m just as interested in the role building competence can have in warding off the demons.

And partly because of this meme.

I’ve talked about it before, but I keep coming back to the fact that it’s exactly backwards. That signing up for an educational quest into Linux, history, or motorcycle repair actually is an incredibly effective alternative to therapy

Congrats on the discovery, DHH, keep it up. Clearly it’s working.

DHH is back in the spotlight after raising USD 12 million from other tech bigwigs for a somewhat shady foundation built around Omarchy, which sparked backlash from employees and customers of the companies involved, like 1Password.

The one change that worked: I banned myself from social media — and my children have never been happier 
theguardian.com

Reading yet another one of the countless articles and opinion pieces from people discovering that it’s good not to spend the whole day glued to their phone, I picked up an ~interesting technique. When Anna Mathur is with her kids and needs to do something on her phone, she “announces” the action:

One habit that helped was narrating my phone use out loud. When I pick it up in front of the kids, I say: “I’m just adding bananas to the shopping.” It keeps me accountable, because once I’ve said it, I do that one thing and put it down. And it tells my children that I’m not disappearing, as I used to.

I think it applies to adult-only situations too.

This guy used Claude to accidentally plagiarize an app

Terry Godier, who made a name for himself in certain corners of the web earlier this year with an essay on RSS and his subsequent iOS app, Currents, launched another one called Dark Hours, this one on the web, after Apple reportedly rejected it for containing astrology elements, which the App Store’s policies ban and which Godier, at first, denied was the case.

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cool use case of chatgpt work i heard last night: connect your family calendars and explain your kids’ interests. every morning for the drive to school, have it make a podcast that talks about one kid’s soccer game that afternoon, one kid’s upcoming birthday, some news, etc.

White man, with dark and short hair, with dark circles.Sam Altman
OpenAI CEO and co-founder

This one goes to the list of great ideas of the AI bros. As someone replied on X, “What if you just talked to your children?”

The scrolly chair 
newcartographies.com

I’ll say it right up front: I’ve written my share of pieces on this topic, which doesn’t invalidate the observation Nicholas Carr made in his newsletter:

I hate to be a cynic, but I’m guessing the main reason for the proliferation of these sorts of articles [about using your phone less] is that they’re algorithmic catnip. They’re symptoms of the illness they seek to cure. We’re addicted to reading about our addiction to phones. If the pieces have a therapeutic value, it probably lies less in helping people gain control over media than in renewing a reassuring fantasy of such control.

Which leads to funny situations, like two chronic phone addicts giving tips on how to use your phone less (podcast).

I get the feeling that content created as an offering to the algorithm god shows up around any popular topic, even niche ones. It hooks people who are idly browsing the internet, across their multiple algorithmically curated feeds that amplify the slightest flicker of interest in a given subject to the extreme.

Another topic, an underlying one, is “PKMs” — personal knowledge management — with their needlessly complex organizational methods and that cool connection graph generated by Obsidian. The promise is that by organizing your ideas in text and linking them all together, you’ll gain the superpower of never forgetting anything.

The outcome for those who manage to break out of these endless content cycles is the same: what was all that for, anyway?

A screen addict on the couch

Close-up photo of a screen, showing the RGB light points.

A few months ago, during a therapy session, I mentioned the possibility that I might be addicted to screens. The psychologist asked what I do when I’m not looking at them. I could only come up with a few things — all simple, some pathetic, like “washing dishes.”

She said it’s common for addicts, upon recognizing their addiction, to find themselves in an existential void. I think there’s no doubt that “washing dishes” is a sign of a huge void, right?

I realized this problem while reading these three paragraphs published by Dave Rupert:

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What is Mastodon for? 
connectedplaces.online

The Fediverse, particularly Mastodon, still suffers from the reputation of being “complicated.” Its key distinguishing feature — federated instances — is also its Achilles’ heel.

A few years ago, I started recommending [pt_BR] joining the Fediverse/Mastodon via the developers’ instance, mastodon.social, and focusing on the personal timeline. It’s simpler to explain and — I hope — to understand, but something gets lost along this easier path.

I hadn’t realized this until I read this post by Laurens Hof on the Connected Places blog. He makes a very astute distinction regarding the Fediverse experience, between the instance layer and the federation layer, and argues that most people live in the federation layer (timeline):

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The security paradox 
densediscovery.com

Living in 2026 consists of fighting with other people on multiple fronts, which has become normalized as “competition.” This applies to everything and always generates a paradoxical effect: the intensification of our private daily wars worsens everyone's lives.

In the latest edition of the Australian newsletter Dense Discovery, Kai drew attention to the book Trapped: Life under security capitalism and how to escape it, by Setha Low and Mark Maguire.

The authors argue that “security has morphed from an inalienable right into a commodity hoarded by those who can afford it,” stimulated by an industry that continues to invent increasingly invasive gadgets and software under a promise that is never fulfilled. This macabre market no longer generates security; it generates fear:

The more you securitise your life, the more those walls and gates and guards make your life all about fear rather than less about fear. And so, as the fear grows, then you want more security, you buy more gadgets, you support all kinds of policing initiatives.

The paradox appears when you take your head out of the ground. The apparatus, delusional in essence, ultimately makes the world worse for everyone:

“[This creates] a self-fulfilling prophecy of fearful people wanting more security, the state and private sector producing it, only to make the world more fearful for some and poorly protected for others.

I think about this every time I pass walls with electric fences and barbed wire, affluent residential condos, CCTV cameras, and ostensive policing. This means that I have been thinking a lot, and increasingly, about the subject.

Is it possible to live without WhatsApp?

Let's get straight to the point: living without Instagram, Facebook, and Threads (lol) is easy. The only setbacks I can think of are missing out on Facebook Marketplace listings and the lack of information about restaurants, cafes, and clinics that insist on limiting their digital presence to Instagram. It's inconvenient, but workable.

In many parts of the world outside the US, the “big boss” of those who decide to get rid of Meta is WhatsApp. And how could it not be? Some research on phone habits shows that up to 99.1% of Brazilians over the age of 16 use the messaging app. Here, it is ubiquitous; the standard means of communication for many people and companies.

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