I often wonder how I survived going for a random drive or even simply leaving the house from 1980 through to the advent of smart phones. Was I simply more brave and self-sufficient back then?
But then I note that there was some infrastructure and also some attitude differences back then that don't exist now.
When my car would break down in the 1980s or 1990s, typically there would be a pay phone nearby. One time in the early 90s, I just knocked on a random door and the resident let me use their land line to call a tow truck (I'm not sure anyone would let a random stranger into their home now, but maybe they still do). Breaking down in the boonies was no fun, but likely someone would come by eventually and help (or murder you, but probably help).
I was reminded recently of this when I went to park in the city in a garage that I frequently patronize only to find they had removed the payment terminal, which was replaced by a sign that said "use our app!". I have a low-data phone plan, so if I had to install their app, I would probably blow past my limit for the month. Also, there was no signal in the garage. So I just left and found another place to park (and was almost late for my appointment).
Also I don't like having to pay just to print my boarding pass at the check-in kiosk. Maybe I am not less brave but just more cheap.
> Was I simply more brave and self-sufficient back then?
Probably! A good reason to exercise those skills again
> (I'm not sure anyone would let a random stranger into their home now, but maybe they still do).
Curious what makes you think that. Perhaps as an exercise, do something that requires asking a favour of someone. You might be pleasantly surprised. Despite all the ills in society, faith can be restored be some amazing interactions with people offline
> So I just left and found another place to park
That's exactly the right response. Being late sucked but hopefully just a once off .
> Maybe I am not less brave but just more cheap.
This is honestly unsaid in a lot of these discussions! The non phone methods can be a bit more expensive. It's a good point but sometimes the difference isn't huge
At one point, I worked in the labs division of a big internet company, where I was a regular software developer surrounded by people with the title "scientist" (basically, programmer/statisticians with PhDs who were running engagement and revenue experiments on our user base).
In the first group meeting I attended, I jokingly asked why no one was wearing a white coat, but my colleagues didn't get the reference, so my joke fell down with a thud.
>Increased speed only gets us where we want to be sooner if we are also heading in the right direction.
I suppose there is an argument that if you are building the wrong thing, build it fast so that you can find out more quickly that you built the wrong thing, allowing you to iterate more quickly.
I think “iterating more quickly” is good for the company doing the building. But if you’re the customer, having a new piece of shit foisted on you twice a day so that some garbage PM can “build user empathy” gets old really fast.
Before AI, I worked at a B2B open source startup, and our users were perpetually annoyed by how often we asked them to upgrade and were never on the latest version.
> Before AI, I worked at a B2B open source startup, and our users were perpetually annoyed by how often we asked them to upgrade and were never on the latest version.
And frankly, they were in point.
Especially in the B2B context stability is massively underrated by the product.
There is very little I hate more then starting my work week on a Monday morning and find out someone changed the tools I'm using for daily business again
Even if it's objectively minor like apples last pivot to the windows vista design... It just annoys me.
But I'm not the person paying the bills for the tools I'm using at work, and the person that is almost never actually uses the tools themselves and hence shiny redesigns and pointless features galore
Yes, but only if you have an ax to sharpen. With a lot of things it takes trial and error to make progress. You can take this pretty up high too - sometimes it takes building multiple products or companies to get it right
> With a lot of things it takes trial and error to make progress
Way too often that is used as an excuse for various forms of laziness; to not think about the things you can already know. And that lack of thinking repeats in an endless cycle when, after your trial and error, you don't use what you learned because "let's look forward not backward", "let's fail fast and often" and similar platitudes.
Catchy slogans and heartfelt desires are great but you gotta put the brains in it too.
Without commenting about the frequency of negligence myself, I suspect at least that you and GP are in agreement.
I doubt GP is suggesting ‘go ahead and be negligent to feedback and guardrails that let you course correct early.’
Plugging the Cynefin framework as a useful technique for practitioners here. It doesn’t have to be hard to choose whether or not rigorous planning is appropriate for the task at hand, versus probe-test-backtrack with tight iteration loops.
I see indecision and analysis paralysis far more. And yes, you do need to thing about things, but far too often I see people not do something because they're worried it's not optimal. But not doing something is far worse than doing something sub-optimally!
> I suppose there is an argument that if you are building the wrong thing, build it fast so that you can find out more quickly that you built the wrong thing,
A lot of people are so enamored by speed, they are not even taking the time to carefully consider the full picture of what they are building. Take the HN frontpage story on OpenCode: IIRC, a maintainer admitted they keep adding many shallow features that are brittle.
Speed cannot replace product vision and discipline.
Tech very quickly shifted to a industry of marketers instead of hackers. And with salesmen, you want to advertise as many features as possible, not talk about how quality one good crucial feature is.
This won't really stop until investors start judging on quality and not quantity. But a lot of those are thinking in finances, and the thought of removing their biggest cost center is too tempting to not go all in on. So they want to hear "we made this super fast with 2-3 people!" instead of "we optimized and scaled this up to handle 400% more workload with double the performance".
The outcome of that approach depends entirely on the broader process. Imagine golf but you refuse to swing with anything less than maximum strength to avoid wasting time.
Discovery is great and all but if what you discover is that you didn't aim well to begin with that's not all that useful.
I would love it if my laptop had a "study mode" for when I am trying to debug something or learn something new using my laptop. Some of us have less than stellar self-control, so a study mode which requires a multi-step rigamarole to shut off might prevent me from casually checking my email or a news website when I am supposed to be learning a new data structure or figuring out a data corruption bug. I have no idea how it would work in real life: I need access to the internet to lookup API documentation, download libraries, and read online books, but I imagine something could be worked out.
(This article mentions that not only are cell phones banned at the featured school, but these kids have hobbled laptops that supposedly help them focus on school work, although the imperfect nature of the hobbling has unintended consequences).
I managed to build myself exactly this with Claude's help. There are 3 levels of protection.
1. I use an app called SelfControl, which blocks websites temporarily.
2. I have a script which watches `/etc/hosts` with launchd and reverts it to a version pulled from a server if the file changes. This blocks websites I never want to go to.
3. I setup a 'focus mode' with hammerspoon prevents me from launching certain apps, and makes me wait 30 seconds and type a string of text when I want to switch it off.
Yes, all of these things can be disabled when I want to, but the point is that they all add some fiction and give me a chance the reconsider the distracting action I was about to take.
I've been doing it for about 2 weeks, so far it's working pretty well!
Create a separate Mac / Windows non-admin account just for coding? I’m sure there are parental control measures for either platform. As time goes you can update the deny list of web sites.
Another thing that helps is recording your screen for the whole day. Once you start doing review in the evening it will create back-pressure on the monkey brain that jumps to distractions.
Yet another thing is to setup a separate computer. You can browse crapnet as long as you want, but you have to walk to another desk. The back pressure is subtle but has long-term effect and requires very kittke will power.
>Create a separate Mac / Windows non-admin account just for coding?
Yes, I got as far as creating a separate account on my MBP a few years ago and I do programming and open source stuff with that account. And it has helped quite a bit! Although it's not perfect (case in point, I am here on HN right now).
Granted it won’t work for 100% of people but I’m sure it would work for lots of people.
Something as simple as a button you have to press to disable it is often enough of a barrier to prevent people from doing that as it makes the context switch from work to non-work more obvious than simply alt-tabbing to a different browser window.
Slowing down the dopamine feedback loop works. Many impulses that lead to distraction are automatic, not conscious. Ever closed a Hacker News tab just for your fingers to immediately re-type the URL into the bar and hit enter? There are browser extensions that delay loading pages on a given site for a number of seconds, to cut off that sort of automatic behavior, and they work as long as the delay to load the site is less than the time and effort it takes to open up your addons manager and disable the addon.
I can't speak specifically about Peter Thiel, but I get the impression that two things affect some extremely wealthy people later in life regardless of their intelligence or benignity: 1) they get encapsulated in a bubble, and 2) they run out of things to achieve, so their obsessions start to become more and more odd. As to number 2, it's almost like those telomeres that keep the integrity of DNA, where every time a cell divides, the telomere gets shorter and shorter, until the cell gets weird.
I stopped going sometime mid-2000s, not because of the cost or the quality of movies, but because of the quality of my fellow movie watchers, who were pretty awful to be honest (at least in Silicon Valley at the time):
- Lord of the Rings: a family came in after the movie started with a cluster of helium balloons, each of which eventually got loose and floated around the theatre. A small balloon creates an outsized shadow on the screen when it floats in front of the projector (e.g., sometimes a third of the picture would disappear).
- A Beautiful Mind: Several guys, in different spots in the theatre, would wait for a quiet moment in the movie and say loudly "Oh my beautiful mind". One guy had a squeaky seat, so each time he said his bit, he would squeak his chair 5 times.
- Panic Room: Two people directly behind us just laughed hysterically at seemingly every line in the movie.
Also, the advertisements went on too long (20 minutes maybe?) and were also rock-concert loud.
Last night, I watched Wolfs (Apple TV) in my living room with my spouse and we enjoyed it. It's not a great movie, but it's good, there are no ear-splitting advertisements, and the audience is well behaved.
Edit: Later in the 2000s I did see a few Coen brothers films in the theatre, and those were good experiences, but I still avoided the theatre for the most part.
>Yes, I would make arguments about how it would strengthen our communities, and the GPL would prevent outright exploitation by our competitors,...
I can't quite figure out what "it" refers to in "it would strengthen our communities". It's probably obvious, but I still can't work it out (the GPL maybe?)
I didn't realize that an 805 meter wide asteroid has enough gravitation pull to drag along a 170 meter wide asteroid (and vice versa, as they orbit around each other).
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