>Looking at my own purchases from 2025, the pattern becomes obvious...

Is it me or does this list really goes against almost everything preceeding in the article?

christianqchung 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I mentally checked out by the time he mentioned buying ray bans as some radical personal statement on privacy and tech nostalgia.

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cptskippy 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes it's very contradictory.

"I'm tied of Apple converting everything to services so I'll eschew the Apple Watch in favor of an analog watch and an Oura ring that requires a subscription."

"I'm tired of distracting notifications so I'm getting Meta Ray-Ban AR glasses."

What I find odd is that much of the rationale for these moves is completely absent from the article.

Why is Linux growing in popularity?

People are sick of being spied on and being manipulated for profit.

Why are people attracted to analog?

People are sick of being spied on and being manipulated for profit.

Why are people looking at offline or self hosted experiences?

People are sick of being spied on and being manipulated for profit.

I don't think the OP wants to acknowledge that fact because it paints him as a technology hipster rather than someone taking back their autonomy from corporations. He's saying "Look at me, I'm an individual because I choose to have a different set of companies spy on me than you do."

The other striking thing to me is that the list is also completely devoid of any sense of morality. He might be using Linux but he's actively spitting in the face of Opensource by choosing a Bambu printer.

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at1as 7 hours ago | parent [-]

> "I'm tied of Apple converting everything to services so I'll eschew the Apple Watch in favor of an analog watch and an Oura ring that requires a subscription."

I wouldn't pay a subscription to Oura, especially with them moving towards a more obfuscated view of individual metrics. I'm grandfathered in to a lifetime subscription. And eagerly awaiting something comparable in the market, but reviews of competing products are not yet compelling.

> "I'm tired of distracting notifications so I'm getting Meta Ray-Ban AR glasses."

These are for travel videos (dense markets, or places where I can't logistically use a phone or camera). My family enjoys the videos. If the glasses are capable of notifications, I haven't enabled them. The glasses have utility without notifications, and without a heads up display, they'd be of limited value.

> Why is Linux growing in popularity?

This was my point "Integrated platforms seemingly made the Linux philosophy untenable, and yet it may now be growing as a direct result of this decoupling. This was a feature, not a bug."

Linux is not part of an ecosystem, and people are starting to realize they like that for a variety of reasons. We're making the same point

> People are sick of being spied on and being manipulated for profit. I don't think the OP wants to acknowledge that fact because it paints him as a technology hipster rather than someone taking back their autonomy from corporations. He's saying "Look at me, I'm an individual because I choose to have a different set of companies spy on me than you do."

The point is that there is growing optionality. It's becoming easier to participate across ecosystems. We can treat tech as an a la carte rather than an omakase menu. Your computer can be one thing, your phone another, and your wearables something else. It's hard to escape big tech entirely, but cracks are starting to form in terms of portability, and perhaps increasingly in terms of alternative options.

> The other striking thing to me is that the list is also completely devoid of any sense of morality.

I had assumed I could just buy a printer I like that's relatively affordable, on sale, and highly rated? It allows me to use 3rd party filaments and import my designs from TinkerCAD or Python generated. What should I have bought?

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cptskippy 5 hours ago | parent [-]

The over arching theme of your article is "tech is fun again because we're escaping the monoculture" but there's a strong unspoken signaling of "look at how cool I am". You're saying "my tech choices signal discernment." You've got this curated counterculture vibe of being off mainstream by being on different mainstream platforms.

The shifts taking place are all reminiscent of the shift from Windows to Apple that started in the late 90s. Back in the early 2000s we had Jony Ive channeling Deiter Rams and telling us how cool Helvetica was. And the "I'm a Mac" commercials beating us over the head with metaphor.

You talk about tech consolidation as something that emerged in the 2000s that killed the fun but consolidation has always been there. Technology is about making your life easier and consolidation is a part of that. When a product can reasonably be consolidated into another product, it often is. Look no further than Swiss Army Knives, the Leatherman, Telephone answering machines, boom boxes, or countless other technology chimera. Even your Meta Ray-Bans are a combination of the Humane AI Pin and sunglasses.

You wax poetically about the need for devices to feel personal, that's always been there. It still is but refinement often is about distilling something down to it's simplest possible form and that's where we're at with Smartphones. So the degree of customization is limited to cases and colors in much the same way as a Swiss Army Knife.

We haven't escaped the monoculture. Bambu Labs is the new 3d printer monoculture. Meta is the AR monoculture. Options like Linux have always been there, they just weren't cool. Gog for example is nearly as old as Steam.

What's changed is that we've slowly moved from running code on our devices to running in the cloud, which has made the choice of device or ecosystem less relevant. Linux is emerging as an option because Apple has grown to be more like Microsoft with age and they're both stuffing tracking and ads into every corner of their platform. They're no longer cool.

To me this article reads as soft elitism with a side of mid-life crisis.

	▲	at1as 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> there's a strong unspoken signaling of "look at how cool I am" I think tech should feel cool to the person using it, but it won't make a person cool either way. And it's an odd thing to fixate on. > You're saying "my tech choices signal discernment." I'm saying I have choices (at least, relative to earlier). I can use a Mac (or not) and that can tell you much less about the type of phone I have than a would have a few years ago. > Bambu Labs is the new 3d printer monoculture. Meta is the AR monoculture Then it's not really monoculture? It's narrow rather than cross-all-domains. I'm fine is there's a "toaster brand" everyone buys, or everyone likes Dyson vacuums, as long as it's not Apple producing it. From what I see there appear to plenty of alternatives to Bambu. Instead of smugly calling people amoral because they bought a popular 3D printer, why not explain what's wrong with Bambu? I still genuinely don't know the criticism. Is it proprietary formats? Banning IP infringing content on their store? DRM? Industry lobbying for something nefarious? Lawfare? What is it that are they doing...? > To me this article reads as soft elitism Wouldn't the Apple bro archetype signal this more strongly? I think you may have seen a Leica in the list and way over-indexed on that, while it's actually at quite old D-LUX Typ-109 (not much newer than the Canon it replaces). And I think the smug condescension throughout the response is closer to a kind of elitism, no? > side of mid-life crisis Hopefully I'm not at mid-life quite yet, and definitely not in crisis. That aside, I’m not sure it's useful to frame a critique of an article that way.