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Yes, as kids probably always did since the invention of the children's room. The usual solution was to educate - and push - them until they hopefully started to understand the benefits that an orderly room can give you and maybe even had some fun thinking of a good ordering scheme by themselves.

Only in tech would the response to kids being too lazy to clean up their rooms be "oh well obviously keeping your stuff in order is an unworkable strategy".

I remember that, back when we were in school, we would actually spend a lot of time structuring the bookmark folder, making elaborate menu hierarchies. Doing this the first time was fun.

The problem was, this lasted about until the first time the PC had to be reinstalled or someone switched the browser or something else caused the bookmarks menu to be lost. Redoing all that stuff after it got wiped was much more of a chore than doing it initially.

But this would be my takeaway here: If software developers want their users to manage their own ordering schemes or use customization features, make it easy and convenient to do - and for the love of everything, threat the resulting bookmark trees, settings files etc as critical data that has to be synced, backed-up etc. If it has to be redone after a few updates or a crash, then no one will use it.

(Incidentally, tech companies have absolutely no problem "educating" their users if the behavior is something they care about. I'm pretty sure, no product or marketing person ever said "oh well, it sure would be nice if all our users made accounts or installed our app, but they're far too lazy for that, so that's a nonstarter...")

Now I have LLMs build me tiny apps that let me upload docs and images with local processing and human verification.

My OCD is finally satiated

- a flat list of items, then you want - folders (or categories), beyond that you want - tag clouds, beyond those you want - keyword and strong search, beyond that you want - natural language queries.

Or any combination of those.

(There are more ways to organize/sort but I either don't know where to put them or they serve a specific type of data. I like the file system representation where each file and folder is a box the size of its size.)

Doing some of it by hand allows a workshop with more tools while preserving sanity.

The actual goal is actually really simple. There clearly is an agenda to get rid of any and all user generated media asap. Anything that works in the opposite direction will help reclaim the users executive function.

When creating a software or other products I always jokingly ask myself what kind of people I want to target and what I want to make them into. The joke is the limited room.

Building your own library should obviously be more awesome than borrowing. It might take the user a decade to see it but when they are old those child hood activities are a joy to be reminded of.

Yes, and that's IMO perfectly understandable. What was that greeting card text? "A clean apartment is a sign of a wasted life."

Not from the US, we didn't have "balancing the checkbook" over here, but watching my parents and grandparents, and trying to mimic them growing up, I have a distinct impression that all that bookkeeping - from budgeting to gas refills to blood pressure measuerments (which my grandfather did diligently in his final decade of life) - was done as much of immediate necessity as it was of habit.

People did their book-keeping by hand because there was no external authoritative source to track it for them, but also because they needed to know - there were consequences for not knowing some numbers or their history on-demand. As soon as either becomes false, people stop. Very few people I know "keep books" for their individual spending - and it's not because auto-pay, it's because the bank gives you that information for free, effortlessly, in near real-time. The bank is now the authoritative source of how much money you have.

(That's the "external authoritative source". Auto-pay is a masssive QoL improver, but it's a consequence, not cause. The cause here is achieving "not really needing to know" by keeping your earnings higher than spendings. Then you literally don't need to care about money day-to-day, and only check balance when you're planning larger purchases - and only then, manually paying bills becomes "a sign of a wasted life".)

> A lot of Zoomer computer users don't even know what files and folders are, they just use apps, which take them straight to what they want to do and don't offer things like possession of your own data.

That's a problem - but zooming out a bit, back to "bookmarks", the problem is that sometimes you need to do some book-keeping yourself - you may have your own reasons to need to know, and there is no authority other than you. Unfortunately, it turns out, modern software is then useless, because it doesn't stop at not requiring users to keep things tidy - it purposefully doesn't ship the necessary tools and affordances to keep things tidy.

Crazy times.

For Office-style documents, there's no better way (except for search and recents), because everybody has different needs and deals with very different kinds of documents. For things that are more standardized, like music or photos, people want to think in terms of artists, albums and playlists, not in terms of some meticulously-maintained folder hierarchy.

Folders have some nifty properties, like good deletion handling, permissions management and intuitive movement from and to different drives, but they don't outweigh the advantage of specialized entities for most people.

Haha, mine too! I guess it was to calculate the fuel efficiency, which is often done automatically now.

I only use it to bookmark it into the database so I can search it up later.

Firefox had a tool partnership with an app that did exactly this, but unfortunately it was put in the grave last year (now I know why).

Am I going to scroll through and find it later? Barely functions with text search due to only minimal metadata (maybe a title).

Worse still, I used to use bookmarks for things I wanted to return to, but now they're all dead links pretty much.. so now I have to go through and get disappointed because something interesting has now gone.

Total waste of time.

Spotlight tried but didn't seem to get very far, and after the mobile revolution, nobody else could due to all the sandboxing.

I guess the fact that it's very easy to search the open web (and very hard to search things behind login walls efficiently) is also a partial cause.

Isn’t it more optimal, from the perspective of play, to have them spread out?

I can see the argument that if you clear your desk, you’ll be more inclined to draw because you have the space. But if I didn’t impose that value, they wouldn’t necessarily draw. They’d just play with something else.

I don’t track my fuel usage. I did once. Economically, I don’t need to. The car tells me my MPG anyway, literally, if I care to look.

Accounts are harder to track now, with fewer physical assets and more renting and subscriptions.

The point you make seems to be that rigidity in the system would bring value. But I think the values people have often exist outside the system. The system is imposing an idea of what is worth tracking or organising in the first place.

Oddly, I think LLMs are quite intentional in their current incarnation. You start with an empty input box, state a curiosity, and go looking for information. There’s very little imposed structure around what you should care about.

That changes once OpenAI et al. start tracking what you do and recommending what you should be looking at before you’ve even formed the intention yourself.

However we've now got local AI to do it for us:

https://github.com/corv89/rookmark

I'm glad Facebook told me about my classmate Eddie's death. We would never be friends but we knew each other and my life was better for having him in a class years ago. My only other chance is hope that it is discussed at a class reunion in a few years.

However Facebook wants to give me the 'you won't believe who is harming our children' overblown scare because that is what sells. I need to cut that garbage out of my life (others have discussed why in detail). Realistically Facebook has about five minutes of useful stuff per day, which doesn't make them money. However now I'm out so they get less.

Sadly as an indie (or frankly anyone these days?) if you don’t have a social media following, you simply don’t exist. Distribution is one of - if not the most - important things to have, so farming social media is unavoidable. The worst part is that you can’t just post and go, these apps (and respective algorithms) expect you to use them regularly for your content to be shown to people.

Automating all of that is also super tricky since there are a billion bots out there. And the alternative being pay-to-win with expensive advertising.

I've also tried to stay away from the news. I have a very long list of uBlock Origin filters [2] to hide certain words and topics on Reddit (even if its politically tangent, it gets blocked), and it works amazingly well. I hate that I have to go to such lengths to avoid the worst of the internet, but I love the freedom of mind I've gained, like really it feels liberating instead of boring.

One last thing: I've started to notice that the corporate claws are no longer in my head. On the train, I see something like 50–70% of people scrolling through algorithmically curated feeds, and I think about how much influence Zuck and company have over what so many people see and think, with almost no effort. The thing is, I feel like the "old man yells at cloud" meme, like I am the crazy person doing crazy things, but I feel better this way, so I will keep doing it.

[1]: https://blog.benjaopazoc.cl/2026/09/social-media-is-ridiculo...

[2]: https://github.com/benja-opazo/ublock-politics

I thought people at work would be mad, but everybody adjusted instantly.

Next up I'd like to pre-plan blocks of focused work - an idea I got from the Deep Work book.

And on top of that work chat

And now agents, which are basically all designed for you to spin up several different conversation threads and hop between them constantly while the agent works.

It's no wonder people can't focus. Both work and leisure are basically designed to split up your attention into microscopic fragments.

They do, and it's annoying that even apps for "real work" do the same thing by flashing notifications/tips in your face, advertising a new feature you don't want to use right now, or warning you that everything is about to break soon.

That the person might not like seeing the perfect offer is less important than filling the hole in the economy.

Which is kind of scary where you realise people spend hours and hours each day watching youtube slop, tiktok, instagram reels, while also subconsciously feeling "this content is worthless and I wouldn't pay $10 a month to keep watching it".

And hide "Shorts" entirely. They will reappear after a few weeks, but you can hide them again.

With my normie setup (logged in account, granted location permissions, no PiHole, no particular anti-tracker mechanisms beyond classic ad blocking), I get decent local results on Google, in contrast to basically any other "privacy focused" search engine.

Chat GPT and Claude seem to be struggling a lot more. I suspect this is because OpenAI and Anthropic aren't talking to the local companies here, and they may have some robots.txt shenanigans going on.

What tech companies understand well is that if a competitor takes away people's pain and you don't, people will use that competitor.

It was technically possible to copy mp3s one by one to a USB mp3 player, and many people did if they had no other options, but marking an artist in iTunes for sync was a lot easier, so consumers preferred iPods. And managing syncing and purchasing itself was a chore, which Spotify proved was entirely unnecessary to the music listening experience for most people.

Sure, there's a small but loud minority for whom the process of purchasing / organizing music itself is enjoyable, and that minority will often try to push their views on everybody else, but the majority of the population wants a "magic box" where they can type "Taylor Swift" and get Taylor Swift music to play. Or they just want "radio, but without the battery drain, commercials, useless yapping and inability to skip songs they don't like."

Volume makes all the difference. If you could only visit sites you bookmarked first and you had only say 200 bookmark limit, you’d keep your bookmarks in perfect order.

That’s an occupant completely ridiculous proposition in 2024; in 2027 you’ll only need to bookmark the AI chatbot services you pay for, because the rest of the internet will become completely unusable by humans.

> Music ks a good example. Most people want to organize by album, artist, year, genre, or song title.

I assumed this is because that's what software is limited to, and people cope, and the only people who really organize like that were the record stores owners. Because personally, this in no way even resembling how I think of my music collection, or how I pick what to listen to.

For me it's usually by theme, personal "feels like they belong together" connection, causal relationships (e.g. music from the same trip I went to in high school), or artist but defined loosely, I.e. tolerant of the fact that artists collaborate and perform together.

> I like to order my photos by outing or by subject.

Outing, yes, but by-subject is alien to me. Most of my photos have exactly zero people, or anywhere from 2 to 20+. Single subject photos are oddity, and I rarely feel the need to organize by them. Events, then by date, then maybe by location.

In both cases search turns out to be the answer, but with photos it's phenomenally unreliable due to vendor fucking with or stripping metadata.

- in bulk, it creates distorted view of reality, by overemphasizing dramatic events;

- individually, approximately half the headlines are bald-faced lies, and the other half merely click bait

- articles usually correct the lies in headlines, but in every case I could independently verify, the text was presenting heavily distorted view of the events

Some of that can be canceled out by following multiple independent sources, but frankly, doing that is IMO one of the biggest ways to waste your life I can think of. Not worth the effort. Meme sites have similar ROI, and are much more fun.

It feels very healthy how I can choose what to engage with, and what to ignore.

Calling it a dumpster fire would be an insult to dumpsters.

How could you write 600 words on the topic and not mention the paper otherwise?

But it's also important to not let fanboyism cloud judgment. Tesla has great software.