Really just function of mobility? Move a lot? 15-16 is combersome. Stationary often, maybe just roaming from your desk to your couch/bed? 16 is totally fine.
I'm in the 14-15 camp w/ lighter form factors being worth the premium.
I tried below 13 after the trend of smaller laptops from a couple years back - I now don't believe anyone who tells me they're regularly productive on these smaller form factors lol.
I recently made a change because I felt the same way. I think it was primarily my phone. I had my full agent setup accessible via my phone and was able to be as productive as being on my machine wherever I was. This made it so any thought, or tickle of the mind resulted in me whipping out my phone, firing off a prompt, and iterating until it got it right.
I switched to a dumb flip phone as my primary device and now my work mostly only gets done on my computer during work hours. I obviously still have my iPhone and I sometimes take it on walks during the day if I want to have a productive walk, but it mostly stays plugged in in my drawer.
I always thought I wanted to be constantly connected to my dev environment and be able to work from anywhere, but it turns out that adds way too much noise to my life and is a net negative. I was constantly thinking about work and then able to act on those thoughts so the cycle just continued until I fell asleep.
> I obviously still have my iPhone and I sometimes take it on walks during the day if I want to have a productive walk, but it mostly stays plugged in in my drawer.
You and I have different definitions of a productive walk. To me a walk is productive if I get my heart beating fast. Bonus points if I see an unusual bird or insect.
I’m getting to that point of switching to a dumb phone. One thing I’ve done this week is completely not allow myself to respond to people/do any work even 1 minute after my scheduled end time. It’s wayyy too easy to do that these days.
Hm thats great insight. My phone contributes a loit to my phychosis and bursts. I check what my sessions are doing, i spin up new ones etc. If i distance my phone at least i ll stick more to the trad 9-5 schedule.
This reminds me that I absolutely love having a voice phone conversations in other words the old way. No video no battery drain simple high bandwidth voice to voice
Hedonic adaptation really is something. I have been deeply trying to appreciate these modern marvels more and more, but it's hard.
A hot shower, air almost 50 degrees cooler than the outside air coming out of my vents, communicating instantly thousands of miles away, it's all so easy to just forget and take for granted
We need a Netflix Chaos Monkey tool for modern life. Each week one modern convenience stops working for a day: indoor plumbing, air conditioning, electricity, wifi, automobile, air travel etc. after one day without, you will again appreciate those things for the next few years
Can confirm. As someone living on well water in an area with semi-frequent power outages in winter I have periodically been given renewed appreciation for the value of power, central heat and running water.
Now I have a great standby generator, though, so I'm sure I'll start taking it all for granted again soon.
I live in an 1850s farm house with a spring up the hill and a backup well with a pump for those Augusts where the trees pull all the water out of the ground (not quite this one!) Our main heating system is two wood stoves with a small propane heater as a backup.
The power goes out a lot in the winter but at least we are cozy, particularly with today's LED/Lithium lights.
Back when I had ADSL from the central office my internet would stay up when I lost power so I had enough power to run a cordless phone and one (of two) DSL modems off a small UPS -- so I could keep 21st century comms. Once I got fiber-to-the-node most outages would affect the node so I gave up on the UPS. They're supposed to get FTTH to my house soon but I have no idea how that is going to be affected by outages.
I also used to be affected by node outages on a cable network, but now I have Starlink and as long as I can generate some power, I can be online. I wouldn't go back; you might consider it.
> They're supposed to get FTTH to my house soon but I have no idea how that is going to be affected by outages.
That would depend on the source of the outage and if your power has single points of failure in common with the comms infrastructure. One would hope the exchange has generator backups to cover short complete outages, but I'm not so sure about equipment between there and your residence (does the local cabinet have a power source, perhaps a battery or its power feed being provided by the exchange and its backups, that would survive at least a short area-wide outage?).
I've certainly had full internet access when power has dropped for my (very urban) home and the rest of the local area, so at least in cases like me the exchange and infrastructure between kept running (and my laptop battery & the small UPS protecting the ONT, router, switch, and AP, kept my infrastructure going even though the desktop PC dropped as it isn't on the UPS).
> As someone living on well water in an area with semi-frequent power outages in winter
After a few of these outages and typically two to three nines of utility power availability, I got a portable generator for my well (we have an automatic generator for the house, but the well is on a separate meter); but we've also had a well pump fail. That was "fun", I think the well company came out the next day to troubleshoot, and then the 3rd day to replace the pump, which took pretty much all day because of the depth of the well. At least it happened during good weather.
I was in the same boat. When I bought this house it had a standby generator, but not on the same meter as the well and not enough power to run my central heating. I recently upgraded the generator to be able to power everything and switched the well onto the house panel. Such a huge improvement.
My well is pretty far from the house. Would have to trench a lot of large electrical cabling to get it connected to the generator. Too much hassle and expense for now.
I've been seeing aliexpress battery + hybrid charger deals that could probably support my pump, at least for a little while, will probably do one of those eventually, especially if we build a pumphouse.
I don’t know if I’m just weird, but my reaction is usually the opposite.
When the power goes out, and you’re forced to sit and talk to people or just enjoy the quiet of the night. I think about how much we’ve lost in the modern rat race.
One of the things that sits with me is that for all we’ve been given, most of us have lost the ability to just sit out in a field and enjoy the stars (light pollution, starlink, etc)
Yeah, OK but this is clearly romanticizing away the fact that you are deeply dependent on these services. See how long you can just sit and enjoy the stars when your indoor plumbing and refrigeration goes away, and more importantly when your neighbors go away, not to mention the billions of little moving parts that must operate flawlessly for something like the global supply chain that brings you those shorts you wear and that tea you drink sitting in the grass and staring at the sky.
I'm not trying to single you out but I am intensely annoyed by the light and airy disregard of an intensely complex graph of interconnected services that make life possible at the density and quality that we enjoy.
We've lost a great deal less than we've gained, and anyone who doesn't think so has not had the joy of involuntarily going without them for a significant length of time.
Fair enough, but I do think there are diminishing returns beyond the basics, and there’s a hierarchy.
We are very fortunate to have clean water and sewage. There are terrible stories in Victorian England of like workers popping in water systems and killing hundreds of people.
Electricity powers a ton of basics and maybe you think you could do without heating and air conditioning until a heat wave passes over Europe and kills hundreds of people. I do think beyond that you start to deal in a lot of tradeoffs. I hate they seemed to have systematically replaced wood burning fireplaces with gas. I moved out of a house with a wood burning fireplace and what a mistake,
Except automated bill pay. I swear I could go back and live in the 70’s if it wasn’t for automated bill pay.
Wood burning fireplaces are, in general, very dirty. There are pellet stoves that are cleaner but it's not a suitable heating method for high population densities. It's fine for rural areas. Many people have them in rural areas, myself included
That's the crux, isn't it? You aren't just dependent, you are dependent on a system that relentlessly stalks you with increased demands. You are tasked with keeping ahead of a pack of hunters who want to take you down -- and not only will your companions leave you for dead the moment that happens, the group will punish any suggestion that we might want to do something about this on a systemic level because they strive to join the hunters themselves.
It's grim and people are correct to behave like it's grim.
Today’s ways of living - no matter how challenging or disillusioning or alienating they may be - are largely preferable to literally being hunted and having your livelihood threatened by predators, compared to the figurative hunters and predators you’re describing.
It ain’t perfect - and we’ll work to improve it - but it’s way better than the way it used to be for so many people. Civilization aint all bad.
I do prefer modern living, but when people describe the horrors of the past, they go for movie horror version rather then anything actually resembling what historians describe as past.
The Hobbes argument can be used to justify tyranny far worse than what we see. It does not prevent me from believing that substantial improvement is possible.
Or his companions need to get better. I interpreted...
>> You are tasked with keeping ahead of a pack of hunters who want to take you down -- and not only will your companions leave you for dead the moment that happens, the group will punish any suggestion that we might want to do something about this on a systemic level because they strive to join the hunters themselves.
...as referring to software engineers as a whole, because it fits.
We're laborers, but a significant fraction of us has misinterpreted having a comfortable salary now as being capitalists themselves, so bought into libertarian propaganda and behave like they're temporarily embarrassed billionaires (for instance, by strongly resisting things like unionization).
Unfortunately, too many of us who are actually interested in "[doing] something about this on a systemic level," are too pampered to have the focus to actually be effective, and get distracted and put all kinds of divisive stuff front-and-center (basically playing into the divide-and-conquer game of the bosses).
If you want to be a capitalist instead of a laborer then you can just go do that. There's never been a better time to start a company and be your own boss.
Yeah, just become an Uber driver and you can be your own boss... oh wait, suddenly your only customer - Uber - can dictate exactly how you do your job.
We've had that game before. Ask yourself why a the capitalists are so eager to make everyone else a "capitalist" too: Because the relationship between companies is even more adversarial and bent on domination than a formalized employer-employee relationship.
Every CEO would love to have "independent contractors" instead of employees.
Being an Uber driver has nothing to do with starting your own business.
You don’t even need to start a business to be a capitalist, just buy capital that can earn you money. That can be as simple as putting a portion of your savings in stocks or as proletarian as buying a lawnmower and a trailer and mowing people’s lawns for extra cash.
> You don’t even need to start a business to be a capitalist, just buy capital that can earn you money.
Step 1: be rich.
> That can be as simple as putting a portion of your savings in stocks or as proletarian as buying a lawnmower and a trailer and mowing people’s lawns for extra cash.
No, that's not being a capitalist. You're not living of the proceeds of your capital, you're living off the proceeds of your labor. The proof: if you stop pushing that mower, your business (or your profits) collapse. "Being your own boss" != being a capitalist.
Now if you can buy 100 mowers and 100 trailers and hire 100 people to push them (plus a couple managers), you might be able to become a bottom-rung capitalist.
A trip to the third world or even easier to a ghetto/favela/poor rural area in your own country is realistically achievable and may lead to an even more profound appreciation. A real life Chaos Monkey is easy to interpret as gamified or temporarily slowed down modern life, so may even be fun sometimes.
I think it’s quite healthy to do that yourself now and then. Probably the most eye opening for me was fasting for a day.
Even small things are enlightening, when my slippers disintegrated I didn’t replace them for a month. It gave me a whole new appreciation for something I otherwise considered insignificant.
I just attended a 9,000-person medieval camping event, where most camps are lit with individual solar power. The only power grid usage by most of us was that site water was pumped by electricity. Due to high mineral content, few of us drink straight from the tap, and every camp has stored water, soft drinks, and so on.
The entire county lost power for about 8 hours. From the social media posts, you would have thought people were undergoing severe hardship, because they had to wait 1/3 of a day for their propane-heated showers. Also, some were angry that the county hadn't done more to plan for these situations... which happen maybe once every decade or so.
If our education system, hiring processes, onboarding/skill transfer support, career development pipelines and similar systems continue to degrade, we should have something like what you're asking for before too much longer.
Good idea. We did have one a few years ago: the Covid pandemic. Societies around the world did not handle it well, or worse, many of those that did spawned smaller chaos monkeys.
Indeed that was a major disruption. If anything good came out of the shakeup, one of the thing has to be that supply chains are even more rapidly adaptable (even if they still aren't natively resilient).
We've dealt with a broken water heater, a city wide wifi outage, incredibly hot temps (thats the current thing), and loss of power for 30+ hours in the winter storm that hit the US Southeast earlier this year. It has really made me come to appreciate each of these things more than I did.
I don't know about others...but thats just home ownership or life in general ha ha
Life is a series of maintenance tasks + a few moments of rest and happiness followed by death.
I think millenials like minimalism for many reasons but some may be the trauma of having clutter in their boomer parents home as well as the idea that each item is a liability. Each item needs a place to rest, possibly time spent maintaining and repairing it, and possibly energy in the form of electricity/fuel etc. Less items = less potential chaos.
I guess the very wealthy don't feel any of these issues since while they are still there money can handle dealing with the entropy. How I envy them sometimes.
The living experience you're describing might be annoying but it's not actual trauma. I think some younger people are too quick to use that word and it trivializes real trauma.
Maybe 'negative lived experience' is a better word? Im trying to describe an uncomfortable situation during their upbringing that has imprinted an aversion to that style in their minds.
Hedonic adaptation is a very good thing. Culture or technological stasis is a death sentence for civilization. Open-ended progress is the only chance civilization has to survive (and even that's not a guarantee).
There is an infinite sequence of future problems to be solved. Each time you solve a problem, you don't reduce the total number of future problems, but you are left with one or more better problems than you had before. It's a very good thing that, as soon as you get accustomed to having air conditioning, you start looking for the next problem to fix.
I've never thought about hedonic adaptation as a positive, but that's a good point that it has some real value in the case of societal adaptations and driving further innovation. We usually view it through the lens of an individual over-adapting to niceties that end up being a drain on their lives long term somehow.
Stasis leads to increasing entropy and a sclerotic inability to adapt to changing circumstances. You're either growing or dying: there is no middle ground.
“Visiting,” says a French writer, “forms the cord which binds society together, and it is so firmly tied, that were the knot severed, society would perish.”
We are solving problems, but we're also creating more problems with those solutions. Greenhouse gases, global warming, oil spills, wars over resources, straining power grids, species extinction, worsening mental health, worsening social cohesion, widening inequality. All are the result of technological progress within our systems of government.
Hedonic adaptation prevents us from asking "is this worth the downsides, or should we go back to how it was?"
It's possible to mistakenly think you've solved a problem when you've actually made the situation worse, of course, and that's just plainly a bad thing. It's important to be able to identify specific things which we thought were solutions but were actually new worse problems, and roll them back if possible. [0]
But that's not really what the hedonic treadmill refers to! The hedonic treadmill is referring to the fact that, when a problem is solved, the level of pleasure or happiness individuals experience reportedly quickly returns to the pre-solution baseline.
[0] Crucially, this must not be conflated with advocating a general slowdown or pause on attempts at progress. That's the civilizational death sentence.
> The hedonic treadmill is referring to the fact that, when a problem is solved, the level of pleasure or happiness individuals experience reportedly quickly returns to the pre-solution baseline.
That is not a fact or objective truth or even historical, that is a hypothesis and a theory.
And the distinction matters. It is not in fact true that all people in all setups and classes and historical periods and periods of their lives were equally happy. In fact, you can be unhappy, solve the problem and be more happy/content for the rest of your life. Overall peoples happiness go up and down.
Hedonistic treadmill is a theory. It is also a slight of hand argumentative trick to shoo away valid complains people have. It was worst in the past, but you are not completely happy accepting bullshit today, therefore you just dont know how good you have it, basically.
Global warming make quite a lot of people (like hundred thousands) miserable as they had to evacuate and then return back to non-existent houses. They literally lost everything except bank account and whatever fit into the car. The areas with high drug and alcohol use, high violence rates are in fact not full of people who have it too good. I could go on ... the inequality and accumulation of power is threatening to make most of us all worst off and it is not because we got spoiled by hedonistic treadmill.
Not by much. I seem to remember some research that compared lottery winners to double amputees. Within a short period both groups had reverted to similar levels of happiness.
>I could go on ... the inequality and accumulation of power is threatening to make most of us all worst off and it is not because we got spoiled by hedonistic treadmill.
There isn't much individuals can do about that outside of polling day. What they can do though is start comparing their lives to their grandparents rather than the Kardashians.
I feel that oftentimes our biggest problems come with the irresponsible scaling up of certain solutions, at which point it is usually too late to roll back because we have come to depend on them. There has to be some time between the moment we invent something great and the moment we make trillions of the thing and realize, oh, maybe that's a problem. But we don't pace ourselves. And if we keep plowing ahead heedlessly, we may very well end up burning everything and collapsing our entire civilization. It's a dangerous game to keep betting on the future without actually ever properly planning anything at all.
I don't think anything like a "general speed limit applied to experimentation" makes sense. In general we should move as fast as possible.
When there's a specific explanation why a specific experiment should move slowly (or even be prohibited), I respect that, but the explanation can't just be "we don't know all the bad things that might happen as a result of this experiment." That's the precautionary principle, which I staunchly oppose.
I'm describing a speed limit applied to production, not experimentation.
We can progress science, knowledge and technology all we want without necessarily committing every resource we can find to producing ten times more stuff than we need. Moving too quickly in terms of production can be detrimental to progress: first movers can and often do take over entire markets, leaving no room for the often better-designed second or third movers to shine. Moving more slowly allows for better maneuvering and making sure the best systems and technology can prevail. And it allows us to see problems coming before they hit us.
I think we could have made a utopia purely from fossil fuels if we had been more careful and restrained using them. In my view, the fact that we couldn't do that is a major indictment of our process.
Nah. Rapid, unconstrained growth in the early production and use of fossil fuels was one of the greatest factors ever in saving lives and improving quality of life worldwide. Stopping that would have condemned millions to poverty, darkness, and death.
And it's a moot point anyway because there was no way to slow down even if some people wanted to.
There is such a thing as borrowing against the future. If we fail to keep climate change in check and millions of people die as a consequence, that may just wipe out all the gains you mention.
And let's not mix everything up. Every innovation is different. Penicillin and the Green Revolution aren't in the same category as bottled water and fast fashion. We can certainly fast track technologies that have large, immediate positive effects while throttling frivolous crap.
Or maybe we can't. Maybe humanity can't plan ahead -- being made from thinking agents doesn't necessarily grant a system a capacity to think. But I find it's a strange act of faith to believe barreling ahead thoughtlessly is somehow always going to be fine.
I often say that everyone should be on a misery week once a year, where you live like our "ancestors".
I.e. like my grandparents, who grew up in the 1920s on a farm, only 1 heated room, privy outside, no running water, limited food options, hard work each day. As my granny used to say to anyone with nostalgia: no, things were definitely not better back then.
Misery week would greatly increase happiness for the rest of the year, add humility, and empathy with the less privileged.
Even just going backpacking for a few days highlights it. Despite access to some modern amenities (maybe a lighter, or a camp stove, and some food you bought and took with you) it's humbling.
Looking for water in the wilderness - even with access to maps - can be quite a challenge in and of itself!
lol a friend would go "camping" with his family and a few other families. They would all reserve the same group campsite every year.
When it would get near to the "camping" time my friend would be preparing giant battery banks, hotspots, and other tech with the right usb/hdmi cables and more...
its a fun adventure because your already know that your comforts and old life are just a flight away.
but regardless it not going to bring any meaningful humbleness because you will forget all about it.
i grew up in povery for first 20 yrs of my life in a desert but i have never think of that life and experience humbless in any different way than ppl who have never experienced it.
Misery week might greatly increase happiness during the week itself. An unheated room with an outdoor toilet, no running water, limited food options, and hard work is basically going camping.
N months ago I was like, "OMG, claude code can work on this code base with me and like, understand it, and do high level things that I tell it, this is magic, how can this possibly even exist?"
Now I'm like, "OMG, I can't believe claude code still needs me to explain XYZ, why is it so incredibly limited..."
I feel like in discussions about nostalgia, there can be this default presentish reaction which talks about all of the things that are better
But in the hedonic adaptation sense like - and comparisons are complicated - people aren’t by and large happier now (because of the hedonism this is sidestepping the argument of how well distributed it is, and I’m talking the past 50-100 years not compared to subsistence farming and the like early Industrial Revolution etc et al)
I do think a lot of the senses that things are better now are based on this adaptation, not thinking about would you be less happy if you didn’t know about some of the small things you were missing.
> people aren’t by and large happier now (because of the hedonism this is sidestepping the argument of how well distributed it is, and I’m talking the past 50-100 years not compared to subsistence farming and the like early Industrial Revolution etc et al
Funnily, this range contains WWII, great depression, run up to them and falldown from them. It all involved a lot of royally unhappy desperate people. It is also shortly after WWI and ex soldiers were in fact unhappy, traumatized and causing further traumatization to others around.
Also, at least in rural areas I know more history about, it involved society with high alcoholism rates, high domestic violence rates, prostitution by young teenagers (14-17) as a genuine social problem. A lot of us are happier then them. Trully. Not a wife of violent gambler and alcoholic today, but we have less wife's of violent gamblers and alcoholics today.
I mean it also includes 2008, COVID and the Ukrainian war. I’m talking about material hedonic adaptation, not have things ever sucked in the past 100 years.
Suicide rates are also up and s/alcoholism/fentanyl addiction/. Funny you bring up gambling because gambling is also up. Rural areas famously peaked in the like mid 20th century and haven’t recovered.
My argument isn’t the typical “gosh the good old days”. It’s more just like the iPhone didn’t make us happier. I might also predict many of the trends you identified are more correlated with economic success than technological evolution.
If we keep on the trend we’re on and America has lost its post war economic domination, those numbers are going to keep looking worse, cute cat videos be damned.
Gadgets are not making us happier, but technological evolution is not just gadgets. It allows us to be less in pain, because we can cure diseases and injuries the way we could not before. Ability to avoid domestic abuse is also related to technological evolution - because it allows you to control the number of kids and it allows women to live independently.
My point is that hedonistic treadmill is a theory that holds only for the less important things. Yes, I get used to new better headphones and they do not fundamentally change my situation. But, when the evolution allows me to live with less pain or without disability, gives me more agency, then yes, I will be more happier and it will be durable result.
> Suicide rates are also up and s/alcoholism/fentanyl addiction/
I did not said it goes up all the time, I said it goes up and down. Despite growth of alcoholism it was much worst in some past periods.
> If we keep on the trend we’re on and America has lost its post war economic domination, those numbers are going to keep looking worse, cute cat videos be damned.
America does not need economic domination over the whole world to be happy. The unhappy people have nothing to do with overall world economic dominance. America could have happier people, if that was its political goal.
> I mean it also includes 2008, COVID and the Ukrainian war.
2008 does not compare to great depression, COVID and the Ukrainian war do not compare to WWII and Holocaust. Not even when we judge by what is going on in the Ukraine itself (as bad as it is, WWII was worst there). And specifically Americans did fought in WWII, bud did not in Ukraine.
Maybe happiness is a different kind of thing from the pleasure/pain axis. Maybe it’s a different thing that’s tragically easy to mistake for the same thing.
I notice a lot of resistance and discomfort whenever someone says anything like this (“are you suggesting my pain doesn’t matter? How about the starving kids in xyz?”), and I get that. But it feels like there might be something to it.
It's true. The negative takeaway is that is no matter what miracles come in the far future (free energy, perfect health care, infinite resources, infinite intelligence), people will eternally be wanting, take things for granted, focused mainly on the things they don't have and can't do. It's the human condition.
That is interesting and I didn't know that, though the commenter said air coming out of their vents almost 50 degrees below the outdoor air temp, so I'm tempted to think they weren't referring to the outlet temperature.
If a comment gets flagged enough, it gets marked as "dead". There's a show dead option you can enable in your HN profile settings to still be able to see such comments though.
I've found that camping and hiking have the amazing benefit of restarting many of the daily pleasures like a good bed, a hot shower, a nice hot elaborated meal, a set of fresh clean clothes, etc.
Everyone reaches the hedonistic plateau, and fast at that. Except for people who sound like they just read a book from some neoliberal think smithy. They will have a euphoric fainting spell over the wonders of the convenience store.
Think about all those elated anecdotes about how someone used an inferior tool for a decade, was fine with it, then tried a better one and now “can’t imagine how I lived without it...” well it’s a bittersweet memory distortion innit.
