"The basic strategy of all addictive technologies is very simple. They make you feel extra capable, they addict you, then they make you feel inadequate without them."
(Original title: How to smoke)
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@tante some thoughts, from me, a rando.
First, the Tobacco lobby is still very powerful. Where do you think all the young people vaping came from? This may be more a UK problem, I don't know - but I think it's international.
That's not what gaslighting is but I get the gist.
A big thing I miss from California is the noticable lack of people smoking in public. Our ban didn't come in til 2007, and we've just passed a landmark bill that means people born after 2009 cannot be sold tobacco legally. So there's some progress.
Maybe it's because I watched my dad's smoking-caused cancers eat him from the inside out, but I don't find pics of people with smoky sticks hanging out their mouths to be cool. Never did I don't think. My whole house stank (he smoked inside). I stank. The dog stank (and, having been white, went an ugly creamy brown). My console cables stank.
The smell is absolutely one of the worst things and more smokers should know this.
So yes, yes to this. Yes to changing norms.
@tante You actually ARE extra capable using a coding assist, or finding vulns via AI... it's not an imaginary or unmeasureable state. And AFAIK it's having zero effect on my lungs.
Still I agree the current way things are, where there's no equivalent self-hostable system right now, it's a serious problem.
It's not simply it's essentially being forced to use proprietary systems, it's also that those systems are under US control, run on your actual (FOSS not not) machine over the internet.
@tante And here I thought those were books in the picture, and thought that the text therefore referred to reading a being addictive.
