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Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

Seeing "SOS" only on iPhone currently. I got worried something had gone wrong with auto-bill pay since I only noticed after I was driving.

It's interesting how naked I feel without access to the internet. I reach for it way more often than I would have ever guessed, something you only notice when it's not there. Last March my area saw large wind storms that knocked out power for almost a week (I'm not in a rural area). I can work around the loss of power but the cell tower(s) that service my area could not handle the load and/or the signal in my house was weak and I was unable to load anything. Not having internet was way worse than not having power and I ended up driving a few hours away to my parent's house instead of staying home.

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My earliest computers were amazingly capable and powerful devices, I could do anything I could think of and spend hours and hours on them.

Now my computer is insanely more powerful but without an Internet connection it feels dead and useless.

Optimize some low-level numeric algorithms, CPU or GPU, it brings back that feeling.

It's even sadder - I used to be able to play computer games for hours offline, now I get about five minutes into even the ones WITH on offline mode, and I'm grabbing for a wiki or other reference. Ah, some of it is just getting old.

I think some of it is just not having oodles of free time to figure it out on your own. When I was young I would just keep trying things till I figured out the game, my time wasn't worth much or at least I didn't value it highly. Nowadays I don't want to spend 1-3 hours figuring something frustrating that's blocking my progress. The "rush" I get from solving it on my own does not make up for the time lost. Also I feel like games made today almost expect you will need the wiki/guide to figure out certain things. Or at least I often think "How the heck was I supposed to figure that out?" when reading the wiki for some aspect of a game I'm stuck on.

That latter part is certainly true, only a few games "offhand" even really try to work "wiki-free" (Factorio is perhaps the best here, but Minecraft is trying).

So.. it's an adult strategy for playing video games to extract a candy coated "win." We are all either overgrown children and always will be, or something has gone drastically wrong in the schools.

I started driving across the US at 3am, didn't notice for the first few minutes until I tried pulling up the address in Apple Maps. Sure was strange following interstate signs for ~10 hours!

Yes I've felt the same way. I feel like we have an instinctual need for social connection that we've filled with internet. Luckily, we do still have meat-space friends and family.

Yeah, that was a big reason I went to stay with my parents/family. I felt super isolated from my friends (local and remote) when I couldn't participate in group chats/communicate. Also I just kept picking up my phone to look up something or check on something only to re-remember I couldn't do anything. I had podcasts and audiobooks on my phone which helped but the isolation was a weird feeling I hadn't felt before. After I thought about it I realized it had probably been a decade or more since I had been completely without internet for more than a few minutes. It was odd...

Portland, is that you?

This happened to us with the recent storms a month or two back, some places didn't have power restored for 2 weeks+

Lexington, KY. Not a massive city but the second largest in KY. I left after 2 days of no power and it didn't come back on for another 3-5 days more after that depending on where you lived.

Portland checking in. Those storms were gnarly and there was carnage all around us. Luckily we maintained power and internet. We have 11 month old twins and a three year old so 10 days without childcare or help was its own challenge.

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