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Comment by prescriptivist | Hacker News Reader

I go truck camping and do a lot of day trips to places where there probably will never be traditional cell phone service. I was against taking a starlink out for a while, but on a couple of weeklong trips over the last couple of years I started to dread my phone coming back online as I was driving out of the woods and all the attendant notificiations. For better or worse I would rather get online and go through all my texts and any emergency work stuff once a day than have to sift through 7 days of catching up on context. It's easy to say "just don't catch up" but it's difficult in practice.

I spend enough time in these places that I'm happy with the balance. I don't run the dish mounted all the time. I don't go out to watch movies, though that could be nice when you are north of the 45th in winter and nights feel like they are 16 hours long. Also it's nice if you forgot to check if your offline maps are still downloaded.

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You need to take care of yourself and learn to switch off man. It's quite liberating to tell your colleagues "my laptop is going in the closet for 2 weeks and I'm uninstalling teams from my phone." If my team cannot survive without me for a week, then we have a huge problem.

Okay but you can take real vacations and ALSO do what the parent is doing.

To clarify, I have never pulled the starlink + laptop out to address anything and I would never bring a laptop on, say, a canoe camping trip with the starlink. Some light guidance here and there via the phone. I'm pretty happy with the arrangement.

Add to that, I take my work laptop when out on trips, not to work. But if I get stuck I don't need to call in sick and can still get something done if I need to wait out a snowstorm or road closure.

do you have a stressful role at work? I am dreading this also

These days with AI it's a lot easier to come back after missing several days. It can often do a good job distilling things, especially if it already knows the kinds of things you'll really care to hone in on and prioritize.

'Claude read all my mentions and summarize them' <-- this or do you do something specific?

Not even just mentions in a chat platform, but all the chat history I've missed out on. All the emails I've missed. All the meeting notes for the meetings I didn't attend. Read it all. Give the agent(s) what kinds of things you're likely to be interested in knowing about, if a certain project you were working on got mentioned or if they made progress on some problem.

> north of the 45th in winter and nights feel like they are 16 hours long.

Cries in Ireland

This is a great example. There's nothing wrong with having connectivity. This skill is just using it when you need to.

Even if we think about trackers that people will wear when going hiking and things like that for help, they have their utility in their place.

I would argue that it is still a different feeling if you actually away from society and out there vs. just around the corner in the big garden.

It's not having connectivity and more about being able to if it was needed period.

It's a similar to if we take a work laptop home and whether it can stay in the bag or not.

Thats not the point i made.

Its just different if you can look at your phone or turn it on or not.

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