Acutally yes, but at the time I wasn’t able to afford all the equipment. By the time I was, I spent about 3-5 more years in this mode before CDs started to crumble

Not sure I understand. What do you buy from Google? If you want to degoogle, purchasing other stuff, or through channels other than the Play store is probably the simplest part.

Have you checked out the FuriPhone? First reports seem promising

Oh, getting your life tracked by Apple is better? Also didn’t know decentralised apps exist in Apple ecosystem

There are less cruel ways of killing a puppy than stoning it to death. Also, what’s the difference between welcoming and acclamating?

Here is some hope: You have a great job and you love the actual work! Some aspects of it are bullshit, some of the time at work you spend on mandatory bullshit, and bullshitters who detract from your happiness exist all around the world, in every industry. But: All that doesn’t completely cancel out the love you still have for your work - otherwise you wouldn’t have phrased it that way, would you? Also a slice of good news is, you have some degree of control over how much you let the shitty aspects cancel out the good things. Admittedly, the control is never 100%. And sometimes, the bullshit and frustration can get overwhelming and does have the power to tip the balance into a minus. That’s when it’s time to leave. Prepare to ge into a new, more rewarding field now. That will give you a choice when you feel the moment has come (probably it’s when you keep saying the above sentence to people in the past tense).

I need to make a meme out of this, combined with the situation when realized that I had already, unknowingly, made that decision to be broke more than twenty years ago when realized I’d make a great teacher, and started going down that career path.

Have you noticed how they react extremly slowly? That’s an explicit setting they make in CSS so rejecting them is sure to waste a lot of your time.

I actually sometmies consent to tracking cookies, when its the site’s primary source of revenue and they need to track my data to survive - like newspapers and other free online publications. But as soon as their cookie consent management comes up with this “legitimate interest” bullshit, I reject everything, just because eff you.

I observe the exact same thing in my parents - it’s as if they somehow can’t see some things on the screen, or lose the ability to comprehend written text, when it’s unexpectedly displayed on a screen. They always fixate on some irrelevant UI element, ignoring the one that’s currently important.

When I found out that my dad doesn’t know what the backspace key does on the PC keyboard. His whole life he’s only ever used the Del key and always positions the cursor to the left of text he wants to delete. He used to work at IBM for over 30 years and learned to program back in the day when computer code was printed on punch cards. But I’m pretty sure keyboards already had the backspace key back then.