This is actually terrifying. Switching to Linux will help us for a while, and the community can take us a long way, but eventually the hardware in physical PCs won’t be able to perform basic functions. Maybe it’s because cloud PCs use vastly more power and web designers inefficiently update to a web 4.0 that won’t be accessible on older hardware – this has happened before. Or it’ll be because the cloud PCs have access to Wi-Fi cards or a new technology entirely to connect that physical hardware won’t have access to – already a standard practice with cell phones’ arbitrary gsm phaseouts.

A phaseout of physical hardware would also entail a phaseout of physical accessories, so you can’t data-horde your way out of this one unless, maybe, you invested in the now-rare M-Disc format and the drives that make them work. You can buy external offline storage for a while, but eventually it’ll all get bought up on the used market or otherwise fail in 5-10 years after the last hard drives get made for consumers. Eventually you will lose all your files and have no way to back them up. No Jellyfin server for movies you legally ripped, no GOG installers for games you legally bought, no music library or ebooks either, they’ll all be gone, stolen, so you buy it all over again in perpetuity.

Our only hope, really, is small businesses continuing to build physical PCs with equal power as the cloud devices. But would parts manufacturers let them? The current situation with data centers, SDDs, and RAM shows that parts manufacturers are increasingly only interested in selling to other large businesses. Consumers can’t boycott that.

I fully expect to be unable to access my bank or make appointments or get meaningful employment if I don’t switch over in 10 to 20 years.

Bangs are helpful, but my problem is that I previously used search engines to find informative articles and product suggestions beyond the scope of Wikipedia, and so much of that is AI slop now. And if it’s not that, Reddit shows up disproportionately in search results and Google is dominated by promoted posts.

Search engines used to be really good at connecting people to reliable resources, even if you didn’t have a specific website in mind, if you were good with keywords/boolean and had a discerning eye for reliable content, but now the slop-to-valuable-content ratio is too disproportionate. So you either need to have pre-memorized a list of good websites, rely on Chatbots, or take significantly longer wading through the muck.

I’m part of the problem. I now use Le Chat instead of search engines because AI destroyed search engines, thanks to all the content mills that make slop. I wish search engines just worked, and it’s a classic example of capitalism creating problems to justify new technology.

And I wonder if it’s just AI. I know some people moved to backing up pre-2025 versions of Wikipedia via Kiwix out of fear that the site gets censored. I know now that I’ve done that, it’s a no-brainer to just do my Wikipedia research without using bandwidth.

Use a dumbphone and hold onto a smartphone to use only when necessary. I have a Sunbeam F1 Pro for daily use. And I have a Moto G Power, purchased used, that I use maybe once every other week for bike maps, public transit, and restaurant QR codes. I’m hoping with how amazing the battery is that will last until 5G inevitably gets phased out. I was using FOSS apps with that, but I’ll just go back to the App Store. Post-DOGE, my threat model doesn’t require degoogling anymore.

Maybe eventually I’ll move to GrapheneOS, provided it finds a way to exist without using Google products and services. I have high hopes for Ubuntu Touch in the 2030s.

For me it’s less about finding a new daily driver and more about limiting the time spent on an Android phone.

I am so glad I had the foresight to use yt-dlp to back up most of my favorite videos. Not all of them, but I just thought we’d get more time.

But yeah, I knew this would happen. The age verification thing was really controversial, so Google would have had to expect that people would try to find other ways to access YouTube. They won’t stop here and will go after Deno and NewPipe.

I’m pretty much done with YouTube. It’s just not what it used to be. All my favorite YouTubers are either gone, have changed for the worse, or are on Nebula. It’s mostly just slop, and I won’t miss it.