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Comment by a3n | Hacker News Reader

Semi truck driver. I have a laptop, and a phone. I use the phone's hotspot.

"Being on the internet" is not part of my job, and many nights I don't bother to take the laptop out of its bag.

I never use wifi because I'm paranoid.

While driving I listen to podcasts or streaming. I never predownload anything.

I don't know if I ever get throttled. Sometimes, even in this day and age, I'm out of cell range, and my podcasts pause.

I might watch a movie on the phone once a week or so.

Which is not at all helpful to you, except possibly to observe: the less you need, the better it is.

Your lifestyle and work may just be five or ten years ahead of it being worthwhile for businesses to provide what you need.

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> Your lifestyle and work may just be five or ten years ahead of it being worthwhile for businesses to provide what you need.

I think it’s also the whole telecoms situation in the US puts it ten years behind everywhere else. The data caps and bandwidth issues are mostly not a technical or business cost issue. Ubiquitous fast and cheap 4G is quite normal elsewhere.

Both wireless and wired infrastructure is so much more expensive in the US than basically everywhere else because of just how freaking HUGE the US is.

Come to Canada if you think it is bad in the US!

Yes, which also means more customers.

You need to include an argument about why you think telecom systems can't scale.

That is the argument. The US is huge and very sparsely populated for most of it. The cost and quality/reliability of a network connection scale with physical distance.

A proper VPN should mitigate that paranoia, if you choose.

Yes, you have to trust the VPN provider. But it goes from "anyone could be monitoring my metadata" to "Protonmail or Mozilla could be monitoring my metadata" and, at least for Protonmail, one credible leak of that would completely end the company.

And this is the relationship you have with your phone provider already... although if you're paranoid, let's skip talking about what can be sniffed between your cell and the tower!

No idea if that's worth it to you, I never, ever use public WiFi without a VPN. Just tossing that out there.

As an aside to the aside, I just read your story of how you went from programming to trucking, and I can relate to a lot of it. It sounds like undiagnosed ADHD, but lifestyle changes are a valid way to accommodate that, and come with fewer side effects than medication. I'm lucky to have the job that I have; I expect I'm more temperamentally suited to driving a truck than to the median software engineering position.

> Which is not at all helpful to you, except possibly to observe: the less you need, the better it is.

Thanks for this.

Truth. I thought I'd be able to cut out more than I've been able to - we downloaded movies before leaving, I have over-the-air TV, etc.

But, it turns out my habits rely on a lot of data - streaming spotify, streaming security cameras to check back home, streaming tools at work... it's kind of eye opening honestly.

I had a similar experience these last 3 months, I bought an RV thought I would toot around the country in, use a cell modem.

But I also want to work on my AI projects , which require bunches of nasdaq data. Or I want to work on a side project, but conda wants to download every dependency for every new environment I make.

I thought downloading TBs worth of media would be enough to make it work but I'm hitting my monthly cap about 10 days in every month.

Starlink might solve my problems, fingers crossed for that. But I almost need a local pip server that caches requests or something :S. And I guess an npm server also.

For AI projects you should really consider a remote machine, like hosting Jupyter on an AWS box or something, rather than downloading everything to your RV.

You know you're right, I was trying to RDP in to my local desktop machine but it was too slow.

I found https://github.com/cdr/code-server yesterday after you said that and it works perfectly, good thought thanks!

I've had vague thoughts of doing a project that might have similar data needs. A linode running my work would be how I'd do it. You only need something local for initial dev, and then observe and control.

Just a heads up, some reports I read about starlink says it only works in one zone. So you potentially can't travel and maintain service. Someone did say they thought that was just during the trial phase, though.

Just a note about Starlink: they use what they call “cells”, so you can’t move around with your Starlink, which is a shame. Maybe they’ll create a plan for that at some point.

Out of interest, can I ask what made you decide to leave development for semi truck driving? :)

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18796367. It's his thread, he mentions why in the description

Thanks :)

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