Agree. I also use Unhook/Brave to remove all recommendations plus my DeCasino to grayscale social media and put a clock over. I only watch subscriptions - clicking from subscriptions bar, not the feed. My phone is fully grayscale, no notifications and only has Brave with custom content filter that removes the main feed as well. It's almost impossible to watch anything on my phone but a video from a direct link. Sounds kind of crazy, but it's finally sustainable.
As a result, I have zero curated feeds, and I only follow people that I chose and started taking more word-of-mouth suggestions. I've noticed that I got much more interested in politics and my internet time is now all meaningful. Algorithms do steer us, they aren't neutral.
I also tried setting my phone to grayscale, but it takes me significantly longer to do useful things, as some UIs are harder to distinguish without color. Have you found a workaround for this?
I did this, and yeah google maps is all but unusable without color, that and the camera takes some getting used to.
I'm on an iPhone, but what ended up doing was creating a shortcut that toggles the phone to grayscale and back, and then having two automations, one for when I open any of the apps I actually want color in (maps, camera, photos, etc) that toggles grayscale off and then another automation to toggle grayscale back on when I close any of those same apps.
The option is located in Settings > Accessibility >Display & Text Size > Color Filters
It isn't perfect, but it works most of the time (I also added the shortcut to the back of the home screen so if it is off or I need one-off color I can just toggle it manually).
From what I know, most modern devices have hardware backdoors, and most TOR nodes are compromised. If you're working on a sensitive story, you'd likely need to physically remove access to internet, bluetooth or any other signal, and not bring any other devices to that place.
Hi eterm, this is very relevant to me as I'm building a self-hosted open-source tool for legacy code comprehension (AI/ML final project).
You mentioned "navigation and babysitting", could you share what that looks like in practice? Do you have to spend time reconstructing context or correcting Claude's misunderstandings? Do you still need to interrupt colleagues for some tacit knowledge, or has that changed?
As a result, I have zero curated feeds, and I only follow people that I chose and started taking more word-of-mouth suggestions. I've noticed that I got much more interested in politics and my internet time is now all meaningful. Algorithms do steer us, they aren't neutral.