zlacker

>>chagha+(OP)
I love my Pebble, my phone is always on completely silent mode and nobody but me feels or hears the Pebble. It feels quite private. I can ignore it during conversions and see what it has to say whenever I look at my wrist later. I can blindly dismiss notifications, knowing they are still open on my phone for later. I never miss important calls but I can also refuse calls without looking away from someone I have a conversation with just by touching my wrist.

But oh man is it infuriating when the Pebble shows me a spam message, for some reason it evokes hate against the spamming company to a much larger the degree than it does on my phone. I'm much more selective about what app can have notification on the Pebble. It's strange, the smartwatch just feel closer to me and it feels like people mess with me when "they use it" to disturb me for useless things.

Sorry, not really a point in this comment but it felt significant to the point of the website.

>>teeker+pc
I think it's relevant. I think there should be an addendum: the human should have total control over "how important" a given technology is to it. So for example, there's maybe 3 apps on my phone out of 50 that are allowed to use notifications. I'm always horrified when I pick up my mom's phone and it's swamped with notifications, popups in the status bar, lock screen flooded over, yuck.

>>komali+3k
Consider, when describing an arbitrary and even perhaps notional human in the singular, using literally any pronoun other than 'it'. Neuter humans are very rare, and, at least in English, using grammatically neutral pronouns to refer to humans has a long and unlovely history.

Use the singular 'they' instead. If you find that too grammatically egregious to be borne (as I do), alternate masculine and feminine pronouns (as I do). Or default to the feminine pronoun except when speaking specifically of someone male. Or default to the grammatical, if presently unfashionable, collective use of masculine pronouns. Just, seriously, do something that doesn't entail referring to a human as 'it'.

>>throwa+mp
> Use the singular 'they' instead. If you find that too grammatically egregious to be borne

Then you've bought into the bizarre, quixotic, and increasingly-being-rejected effort by Victorian elites to try to pretend that English is some strange constructed Latinate language and not, well, English.

And you should give up.

OTOH, if you really need to refer to a gender neutral abstract person in English, and really can't bring yourself to use "they", learn to use "one" properly. This can require restructuring sentence and not just dropping a different pronoun in, e.g., this:

  the human should have total control over "how important" a given technology is to it.

might become:

  one should have total control over "how important" a given technology is to oneself.

>>dragon+uP
Wider usage of "one" -- in German, man -- is something I miss from studying German. It's a pretty elegant solution when it can be used.

Of course, the German version catches flak for being too close to "man" (Mann), and is sometimes replaced with frau (Frau meaning "woman"). So it goes.