I want to be left alone (2024)

Open-source / noncommercial isn't exactly a cure for the steady drip of "like and subscribe" type of harassment these days. Probably just because commercial interests have pushed user-harassment so hard for so long that the window has shifted and now users expect harassment, and because at least some makers actually feel their work is less professional if they don't engage in harassment.

Open your laptop, dismiss ubuntu wanting to update stuff; open firefox and have your adblock extension popup to tell you how many ads it blocked and to give you a helpful advertisement for updating your adblock; open a web page, any webpage, dismiss at least 3 popups for cookies, decline to signin in google/facebook, decline the newsletter. Get another browser extension to solve these problems, it will probably have pop-ups to tell you about "what's new". Open github to look at some code, get asked to star the project above the fold in the documentation. Forget what you even wanted to do with a laptop, close it, dive into much more productive work by figuring out the best way to feed your laptop into the kitchen garbage disposal in small pieces. Just another Tuesday