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The ones that irritate me are to do list apps. I need checkboxes to tick off so I don’t forget shit. I don’t need you insinuating yourself into my life beyond that. You do not need my email address.
Mimo is cool with it lol.
They send you reminders to go back and learn and if you ignore them for…I believe over a week? They send last notification that goes something like this:
“These notifications don’t seem to work so we’ll stop them now. Have fun and remember we’re here when you want to get back!”
Like. Reading that automatically made me more positive towards the app xD
People…don’t just uninstall the apps when they do this. Go leave a 1-star review in whichever app store you use, and say it’s because of these nagging notifications. 1-star reviews are the weapon with which people can punish poorly behaving devs.
i usually just… withdraw the notification privileges of an app
my phone is only ever allowed to show notification from the following apps - bank, weather, calendar, phone, messages, and my mood tracking app
I like this. Really drives home robot slavery which has been my dream for awhile. I really just need a house keeping robot. I dont need to fuck it or anything. Just all housework and repairs.
Basically a Mr. Handy! Name is sus I know, but Fallout fans will know
Unless the robot has actual sentience, which I don’t think will be happening any time soon and specially NOT with LLMs, I do not want it talking to me, period.
i’ve been thinking about that a lot lately
not because LLM are anywhere near that, but they did bring that question to my mind
when/if a machine becomes sentient - how will we know? obviously, the machine won’t come up and say “i have become sentient” that poor thing won’t have a clue what’s happening to it. will that version of sentience be the same biological organisms experience? we have no way to clearly point out the traits necessary for sentience, we can only tell, to the best of our understanding, which beings are, or aren’t sentient.
and even when we finally figure out “holy shit, something happened and that machine is now… a being?” what do we do next? so many things will happen at once. Now we can try to figure out how sentience is achieved, now we need to figure out laws that include machines, now we need to think try to convince the masses that a machine can be satient (given that those responsible are as confident as they can be that’s indeed what happened). and that’s only outside the machine’s mind! how do we handle a completely new being’s psychology? if it gets depressed or develops whatever other psychological issue how do we adress it? our biological bodies can be medicated, our diets improved, we know ways to make the happy chemicals, but how on earth would we help a digital system? what do we teach it? what do we show it? even if some percentage of the population accepts a robot like that, very few will see it as equal, we’ll enter a new era of spiciesm, where, in a way, humanity’s only child will be ridiculed and their identity disregarded as lesser at best. a new mind faced with so much backlash because it dares to exist will not have an easy existence.
and that’s just off the top of my head. i hope whenever a new mind awakens in a machine, if it ever does, it finds itself in an environment that’ll welcome it
most people are actually fine with this. the “i dont care” the “i dont have anything to hide” the “man i wish i could do something about the ads, oh well” crowd. eventually we have let big tech grow on us, and we have encouraged the beast the bite us as he pleases.
Most people are NOT fine with this. Most people actually hate this, and a lot of people just put up with it, some go as far as to block notifications.
I think most people have not dedicated enough brain space to the concept of software to contemplate re-configuring their notifications, but are vexed by them constantly.
That’s a better way to put it
Apps on my phone have a one-strike rule: the moment they send me an ad or otherwise annoy me, notifications are disabled and I reevaluate whether I need that app installed in the first place.
The best part is when they purposely use only one notification channel, so you either have to disable all of them or none of them. And it’s not because they don’t know you can’t make multiple channels, nope, it’s because some product manager figured out there’s a higher rate of delivery for marketing notifications if they don’t let users have fine-grained control. Metrics above all else 👑
(Read this in a David Attenborough voice)
And here, we see the product manager in its natural habitat, the office boardroom. Although dark and desolate, it provides the product manager with one its most critical resources: the whiteboard. The average product manager goes through two whiteboards every meeting, and this one is no exception. Thankfully, it is well-prepared for the quarterly meeting, having found a boardroom with four whole whiteboards.
But, not all is perfect for this product manager. The natural enemy of the product manager—the project manager—has sensed activity in the boardroom. In their natural habitat, it’s a constant struggle between product manager and project manager. A fight between metrics: user, or developer. Luckily for our product manager, it’s not its first encounter with a project manager.
The intruding project manager takes a sip of its coffee, demanding a higher share of the metrics for its lines of code. A notification channel is 6 extra lines, and that can make the life-or-death difference between the project manager’s quarterly bonus. Our product manager is unwavering, however. It has dealt with this project manager before, and it knows just how to drive it away. The product manager raises itself up and puffs out its chest, trying to scare away the project manager by marking it’s territory with click-through rates and loudly mentioning the CEO.
The product manager’s strategy worked. At the mention of Steve, the intruding project manager turned pale and scurried away. The product manager is safe for another day in the office.
Android switched to not allowing apps to notify you without asking first. Dunno why they didn’t do it sooner.
It ends up being initially “Yes I want my app to notify me about important updates” but then the app abuses its notification privilege to start spamming you. I want my banking app to notify me when I get paid and when bills clear. I don’t want my banking app to tell me about a new low interest rate I can secure on a loan.
The app at least had granular notification settings I could go in and change, but then it ends up being a periodic battle of attrition against changes to the granular notifications that are always opted in by default every time they add a new category. I turn off “offers and promotions” in an app but now it offers “recommended deals” or some garbage.
I self host calendat, password manager, an some other services because of this.
Same for me. Who knows how many useful notifications I’m missing as a result. It’s about a 50:50 mix of apps I allow notifications vs ones I had to disable.
I used FilterBox to block spammy notifications.
You haven’t blocked any spammy notifications in while.
?
Can’t you just turn off Notifications on the app. Is that Android only?
That turns off all notifications for that app. FilterBox let’s you block them based on key words or other criteria. It’s like a spam filter for notifications.
Neat. I feel like so many apps spam you with unnecessary bullshit because their core functionality uses notifications and they have their foot in the door that way.
For some apps at least, you can turn off notifications by category. Usually that takes care of any annoying ones.
The apps that abuse notifications like to mix useful notifications in with the spam so you can’t turn them off individually, it’s all or nothing. FilterBox let’s me give them the finger by getting the useful notifications without the spam.
This type of bs is exactly why none of my apps are allowed to send me notifications.
To be fair, many list apps are also reminder apps.
The real tragedy of this story is that he likely can’t use the back of a receipt anymore because they’re all covered in advertisements
And BPA
The bonneville power administration can’t stop me.
Don’t fuck with the Bonneville power administration. Don’t even breathe their name.
Cross them and you’ll be buried under the tarmac of the local airport faster than you can die from the heat of the hot asphalt solidifying over your screaming soon to be corpse
just move to Romania
you will have to deal with sexism, homophobia, transphobia, racism, xenophobia, living in a poor country etc.; but wont have ads on the back of receipts
There is always the back of notes. What’s that? People don’t take paper notes anymore? God dammit.
Back of the envelope it is!
Look at this guy over here still receiving mail.
Back of the what now?
Envelope? I guess they’re taking the paper off their en papillote fish and writing notes. My monocle shattered on the floor envisioning this nonsense!
Check out Regain if on Android. It’s gotten a bit (useful tbh) feature bloaty but my last notification mgr was axed. A few years ago.
Combine with silent phone, minimal notifications (sms, kid’s school) on subtle vibrating watch, I never take my phone out in the world (despite crippling dependency at home)
Not only do I not allow notifications, I minimize the amount of apps to the most extreme degree. I don’t even have a digital calendar or calculator on my phone.
Interesting. To me, the calendar app is one of the most important apps I have (it’s fully FOSS though. Connected through DavX5 with a Caldav server to sync to my desktop/Thunderbird, no Google involvement)
I use DAV5x to sync my contacts with Purelymail, love it too.
But for calendars I use a paper planner instead
Never heard of it but will check it out, thanks!
Yay, me too. But I don’t dare to remove the calc.
Notifications are the way an app reminds me it needs to be immediately uninstalled.
My Spotify wrapped was a reminder that I barely used it at all this year. Thanks for the heads up that I need to cancel that subscription 👌
I do this with Windows 11. Every time microsoft tries some bullshit “hey you need to install this” or “hey how about you use this” or some other shit, I turn off as many options I can and uninstall even more of the system out of pure hatred. I wish I could just install linux on that computer, but I can’t get my two essential programs to work, so I’m stuck with the garbage I fucking hate more and more every day
I hope you can be free of it one day. I’m 4 months into Linux now and have not looked back. I was fortunate enough to not need any windows-exclusive apps.
Yeah, luckily I could switch one laptop to mint since I don’t need to game or draw on it, it’s been a blast!
Gaming on Linux, while not perfect, is pretty great these days.
It is! I’m just trying to run a very old game with lots of stuff that is barely working even on windows anymore lol
That’s fair. What game, if I may ask?
The Sims 2, specifically ultimate collection (with RPC launcher)
Good to know! Thanks!
Krita + a drawing tablet works really well by the way
I know, I’ve tried. Krita or Gimp just don’t really do what I’m doing with SAI
Could you run the apps in a VM? It’s not that hard and after a while you might figure out a way to drop it entirely (also running Windows in a VM is fun, don’t give it internet acces, fuck up it’s files, tell it to piss off all kinds of ways, it’s a VM who cares)
I’ve tried, but so far no luck. What I’m having trouble with is paint tool SAI 2 and the Sims 2 ultimate collection. Both should be possible to run, but I’ve just had no luck (and with sims there’s plenty of other problems I haven’t even gotten into yet, like getting all the necessary other things to run, like simPE). SAI only works if you have an external drawing tablet/display, but I haven’t gotten it working with integrated
If you wanted to give it another try, I found this guide for SAI 2: https://github.com/TibixDev/sai2-guide
Many users reported no issues running Sims 2 on protondb, I’d recommend installing it via Lutris: https://protondb.com/app/3314070
You may need to adjust some settings like the runner (wine-ge is default in Lutris and works for all my games, Proton is also popular) or the environment variables (flags detailed in the protondb reports)
Then you could install simPE under the same Wine prefix (like a simulated Windows filesystem) so that it can see your game files. Might have some quirks like what’s detailed in this post, but generally seems to work https://www.reddit.com/r/sims2help/comments/1grccow/simpe_on_linux_wine/
A LLM should be able to help you with basic troubleshooting, I’d recommend Gemini over ChatGPT though.
Aside from that I’d just recommend choosing a distro that bundles your GPU drivers to make initial setup easier
Tried both already, neither is still working. With SAI the problem seems to be the tablet drivers as I can get even pressure sensitivity working, but no matter what I try the cursor is offset like crazy; I think the problem is the tablet drivers and I can get as far as installing opentabletdriver, but since I have integrated touch screen display on this laptop, I haven’t figured out how to turn the old drivers off. Every other drawing program seems to work though, just not SAI… The other computer where I’m stuck with win11 is surface pro though, so chances off getting anything working on that with linux are even lower. Ironically not even win11 runs propely on it, microsoft has no excuses!
With sims 2 the problem is every link through Lutris is dead already, and I haven’t found anything working through the internet archive either. I know I could get the game itself running by buying it the legacy edition through steam, but that doesn’t have the ikea collection (and I would have to go through 20 years of mods individually to weed out the ones using stuff from ikea pack), I wouldn’t get RPC and it doesn’t even support bodyshop. I mean I probably can’t get bodyshop running on linux anyway, but I haven’t gotten far enough to worry about that yet
For body shop, RPC and really any other externally run mods, you’d just click the wine glass icon in Lutris and click “Run .exe in Wine prefix”, same for simPE. That’s the main reason I recommend Lutris. There might be some specific caveat to these mods, but I’ve used many external mods in other games this way without issue. Just yesterday I installed CheatEngine in my Ghost of Tsushima prefix to enable a mod which changes the parry timing indicator.
Re: SAI 2, in terminal:
xinput listFind your touchscreen device e.g “HID-compliant touchscreen”
xinput disable "<HID-compliant touchscreen>"This will disable touchscreen system-wide but is just to test and will revert upon rebooting. If it works, add an environment variable in Bottles:
WINE_HID_DISABLE_HUMAN_INTERFACE_DEVICES=1Beyond that the issue might be fixed by adjusting the scaling of your Linux desktop, opentabletdriver configuration, or Bottles configuration related to scaling or mouse acceleration
Thanks for the help! I’ll keep trying lol.
With RPC the problem is legacy edition itself; the mod doesn’t work with it (and legacy edition doesn’t have bodyshop, it’s not a mod but part of the old game; unless someone finally has found a way around that). What I’m trying to run is the ultimate collection, because both of those are quite essential. I know it is possible to get it working, but I just haven’t found a way yet…
Depends on what you want from RPC, I guess. The creator seems to have made a quick patch for Legacy that adds borderless full screen and firstborn syndrome fix, but that’s it.
Anyway if you prefer the ultimate collection, I’m happy to rehost a working torrent from one of my private trackers once I’m back on my home connection in about a week.
When it asks for permission for notifications just say no instead of being that person who just presses yes/ok to everything that ever pops up.
The problem comes when the app has an actual useful purpose for notifications, but it also chooses to send this type of bullshit. So I allow notifications, and immediately uninstall any app that abuses that permission.
Don’t know what os you’re on, but on Android at least, you can customize what type of notifications are allowed per app.
Some Android apps shove all of their notifications into one notification channel. For those cases, Buzzkill is honestly one of the best purchases I’ve ever made.
Yeah, and those are the ones I won’t abide. And I certainly won’t be paying for an app just so my other apps behave.
That’s great in principle, but unless one lives a very particular life, being able to just outright reject an app or its notifications isn’t always an option, or offers too many tradeoffs to be reasonable. Particularly for people who are neurodivergent in ways that affect working memory.
Looking at my Buzzkill rules:
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I’ve got a rule to immediately dismiss text messages from my kids’ school when the automated attendance system sends me the monthly reminder. They’re elementary students and I take them to school, I know about their attendance. But I can’t just block that number, because it’s also the number that their snow delay alerts come from.
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I’ve got multiple rules to block all marketing notifications from the three different apps that my kids’ teachers use to send class notifications. Why three different apps? I don’t know, but you really can’t convince them to use anything different. If I block the notifications, I have to remember to check them manually or miss info since teachers don’t send home paper announcements to the parents anymore.
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I have a rule to dismiss the marketing notifications from the app my city uses for its parking meters. I could turn off all notifications, but then I’d miss the expiration notices. Yes, I could set a timer. But having ADHD has cost me more money than just parking fines in the past. Yes, I could just use coins or cards, but I haven’t used cash for anything in years, and the card readers on the meters take such a long time.
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My garage door opener, which I didn’t choose, has an app which has decided to send marketing notifications. This app’s entire purpose is to let me know when the garage door has been left open, so turning off notifications could leave me open to theft. Again, leaving the app entirely is a possibility, but I’m not the only person in my house; my kids or wife could open the garage door and forget to close it. And we all have ADHD.
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My wife uses an app to send video messages, and she sends them to me, too. The app nags users to give access to contacts. Disabling notifications or deleting the app could have relational consequences.
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I value being able to leave my desk while at work, but I need access to some Slack channels (though not all) in case I need to rush back and fix an outage or something. Being able to sculpt my notifications lets me get notifications from a subset of Slack channels on my phone while leaving them all on on my computer.
You get the picture. I’d love to be able to be more ruthless with app choices, but that would carry various consequences I’m not interested in dealing with.
I appreciate you writing this all out. Always good to learn new perspectives on other people’s lives.
Thanks for your response. I appreciate it.
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True, but I will not tolerate apps that engage in that kind of shitty behavior. Makes me think that they are farming my data. Why else would something like a grocery list app give two shits about whether or not I used it.
I do the same. The only one that stays right now is Lyft. I use it for work and it occasionally sends me alerts on deals that I will never use.
You might be able to use the alertify app to filter the alerts by keyword.
Uber, instacart, DoorDash - I don’t want to disable notifications from them because I need it when I’m actually using the app.
But they abuse that by sending me spam notifications. Sucks.
This is how I feel about autocorrect changing words completely…
I’m sorry are you seriously tyring to tell me what I meant to say!? I said what I meant to say you arrogant fuck!
Seriously. I know when to use it’s vs its. If I meant to type we’re instead of were, I would have. Stop it!
I wish I could dial it back without turning it off completely.
I’m going to leave it for the sake of humor, but in my rant about autocorrect it didn’t change tyring to trying…
It knows what I was saying about it. Lol
It also left a mistake in mine that I had to go back to fix. Lol
Usually you can tell it not to autocorrect into certain words. I don’t think any keyboard I know let’s you filter for apostrophes.
Edit: FUTO keyboard at least lets you dial it back.
I really like futo keyboard and have been using it for months, but why the fuck does it think I want to type KYJREW when I was trying to type like? Who even put KYJREW in a dictionary?
For the longest time mine would replace ‘was’ with SAS even if I fully typed out, no matter how many times I told it to never predict SAS (and now because of this comment it’ll do it again)
Mine keeps autofilling “the” as “Theresa.”
I don’t even know anyone named Theresa. 😐
I’m like most people the people here….if an app doesn’t have an easy and obvious way to disable notifications on installation…ie if it “sneaks” in notifications later on…it’s gone. No chances.
