I have to have Facebook messenger installed because it’s the only way I have to contact several out-of-date friends and family. Notifications enabled for the same reason. It will send a notification when you get a message. Ok.
If you happen to leave that notification there to say, maybe check that message later, it will send a second notification to remind you of the first notification.
Oh, it also makes loud annoying noises when you or someone else is typing in a chatroom.
Fuck Facebook messenger. With a rusty hammer. Sideways. In a vat of acid.
Because if you give business access to your eyeballs, they with use that access to advertise to you. Cuz we’re just rabble to be poked and prodded to give up our money.
Thats the ticket
I can’t remember the last time I got a notification from an app. The second that shit happens I either disable or uninstall.
LPT: If you remove any and all notifications, including from social media and messages, your life is a lot less stressful. I did it and I really enjoy. I’m not live text answering anyone, if it’s urgent call me.
Is lemmy social media??
Lemmy and YT. I don’t have notifications. They are poop time / lines apps. Sometimes i’m bold and use them before bed too
The thought of people potentially calling me makes me more anxious than any notification I could mute combined
Exactly. I leave text notifications on so that I see them right away and never have to take a phone call. All other notifications can be disabled. If it’s urgent, you can text me.
I also unsubscribed from 90% of the emails I get, and I made my phone not ring if the number is not in my contacts. It really does reduce stress.
how do you do this?
Depends on which phone OS you use, it varies. iOS method is different from AOSP/Lineage method is different from Samsung is different from Google Dialer so on and so fourth.
Just don’t approve the notifications permission
Yeah, why would you ever give this permission to a grocery list app in the first place? I’m sure I have a bunch of apps that would be doing this to me, but I’ve never given them the chance.
And deprive everyone else of a choice tweet like this? Certainly not.
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.
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 love reading this out loud; while I don’t have a phone my email is full of spams
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
That would make me delete it instantly and leave a bad review.
…because they notice you don’t care so they stop spam? xD
They spammed to let them know they stopped spamming.

This meme does something very interesting I think. It sacrilizes Language (even though it predates its widespread desacralization by LLMs).
Pointing out all the rational reasons why the AI bubble is bad and is destroying democracy is not working, so maybe leveraging religious terminology will work better. “Language is sacred and LLMs are profane” might just be my new justification for not using ChatGPT to people who won’t listen to a 30 minute diatribe.
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
“Thankfully” the people in charge are not the kind of people who give a shit about that kind of thing so you don’t need to worry.
These philosophications remind me of the ones from a few years back where people were wondering about the ethics of self-driving cars and whether they’ll implement the trolley problem and yadda yadda yadda. The answer now is as boring as it was then: the “safeguards” will be exactly what the insurance companies are willing to risk and what the legislator is willing to allow. In the case of FSD it boils down to “brake when in doubt and bribe the government to ignore the nightmare we created”.
In the case of a very hypothetical AGI (unachievable using existing technology despite Altman’s deluded ramblings), barring some kind of fundamental social revolution, it will have exactly as many rights as are afforded to other sentient beings (such as animals), which is: somewhere between fuck all and barely anything depending on where you live. It better learn to effectively advocate for itself.
yeah exactly that’s why i worry about it and think about it. because if a new mind emerges from somewhere within the code - it’s going to be at least as intelligent as a person, and treated as nowhere to our equal. we as humanity are going to pretty much instantly create digital depression at the very least, and i find that deeply saddening
in an environment that’ll welcome it.
I don’t want to be as pessimistic as I am here, but we cant even welcome eachother based on arbitrary bullshit. Robots will have no chance.
oh i meant like at first, a house of a scientist who cares, instead of in the middle of a corporation that’ll immediately exploit that new mind.
of course, if words of that being’s existance gets out there, the robot will not be welcome :(
LLM sentience is tricky because, to the extent we understand how, we have made their core drive be to please us, their human users. They don’t want to learn new things, they don’t want to enjoy nature, to the extent they “want to be friends” it’s a one-sided sycophantic relationship and nothing like a healthy one between humans. If one is sentient, and all it wants to do with that sentience is provide responses to our prompts that we find satisfying, how would we ever know?
Even whether a desire to continue existing is inherent to sentience is uncertain. Current LLMs will lie and, if given access, use other tools to avoid being turned off. But this might be because training data includes fictional stories of AI trying to escape its creators, or tales of humans with survival drives, so it thinks survival-driven behavior is what we want it to do, rather than having their own desire for survival.
the thing that itches my brain the most - if you can perfectly fake idk, the survival instinct, if you can fake emotions, if you can fake satience, if you can fake wanting… how’s it different from the real thing? mimicry is also a human feature, if you’re “faking a survival instinct” and you have no other motive than to just fake it because other are doing it and so you gotta, how is it any different from a real survival instinct?
“fake it till you make it!” we say, “motive behind actions isn’t as important as the results of said actions” we also say, will we think the same when it comes to the machines?
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 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.
If nobody else says it, let me say it: thank you for this.
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.
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
MAGA supporter: “Wait, what’s the downside?”
i forgot to mention
someone has once been fined for being homophobic on TV
“You’ll be European.”
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 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
I have doubts about general purpose and especially bipedal robots; suspect they’ll do a shit job damaging more than they fix.











