Uber Eats drivers definitely don't have them where I live. Food almost always arrives cold, even when the delivery time is very short. When I lived in NYC most deliveries were done by bike and all of them had insulated bags so the food was typically warm unless it had been super delayed.
Also food delivery drivers employed directly by restaurants typically have an insulated carrier in their car or on their bike to keep your food warm. Uber Eats drivers don't so the food gets cold way faster.
Not to mention humans 150 years ago who ate plenty of bread and still didn't have the problems we have with obesity and diabetes. Or even 50 years ago...
This is such a great comment. Thank you for having so much empathy and willingness to meet people where they are. I hate how smug people can be these days. At the end of the day it's counterproductive (unless the objective isn't to change people's minds but to enjoy feeling superior, which I suspect is true of a lot of people).
I've been out of the house all day (6+ hours) with my M1 Pro and it's only just starting to get close to needing to be plugged in. What have I been doing all day? Just running the 23 different docker containers required for my local dev environment. This thing is an absolute beast.
I've tried a couple of them. The problem is that they add so much friction to the basic functionality you want from a phone that they eventually become too frustrating to be worth it. Using a Light Phone gave me an enormous amount of respect for the work Apple has put into making their touch screen keyboard feel so responsive and type so "accurately" (by which I mean gracefully handle the inaccuracies that inevitably arise when typing on a touch screen). I just don't see a small startup ever being able to deliver a user experience that even comes close to what we've all gotten used to thanks to Apple, Samsung and Google. At the time that I bought a Light Phone I was desperate to be free of digital distractions but eventually I decided I would rather be distracted if it meant that I could effectively communicate with family and friends and maintain a social life without so much hassle.
I tried a Light Phone as well and I found that it made texting so difficult it was basically useless to me as a phone. I then tried a basic flip phone which was more useful but ultimately still added too much friction to my life to be worth it. Now I'm back to my iPhone. It would be great if Apple created the equivalent of those minimalist Android launchers that allow you to remove distracting apps and simplify the UI. At the end of the day a phone is a tool and none of the minimalist phones currently in existence work well enough to be a useful tool for me.
It's because a lot of people who frequent HN have difficulty with social skills and are always looking for a manual for how to handle tricky interpersonal situations. The problem is that their difficulty with social skills renders them not-so-great at assessing the quality of advice about social interaction so they upvote things that they think sound nice or valuable without realizing that that's not actually the case. I hope this comment doesn't come across as judgmental or mean, it's just something I've noticed as a person who works in tech but has always had strong social and communication skills. This article describes a communication style that is repellent to anyone with normal social skills who doesn't have cluster B tendencies.
I have a family member with BPD and this feels like the kind of article she would write. She loooooves hearing those hollow therapist-isms that I personally find artificial and deeply alienating. Someone commented elsewhere that the author of this piece committed suicide in 2020 and her husband published a memoir about her in which he suggested that she might have BPD...so that tracks. It reads like a manual for how to have a conversation that completely centers the other person in a way that the majority of people would find uncomfortable and disingenuous but that appeals to someone with cluster B tendencies whose main goal in relating to other people is to feel emotionally validated and cared for at all times. It's not a good strategy for relating to a normal person; normal people enjoy reciprocal conversations that feel authentic and involve a healthy degree of relating to the other person's experience.
My family member with BPD isn't really capable of connecting with other people in a reciprocal way...she only understands relationships in which she is the caretaker or she is the one being taken care of emotionally, so she sees all relationships through the lens of that dynamic. That's the vibe I get from this author as well.
This is one of those tricky things...interrupting someone is rude but pointing it out is rude too. It makes the tone of the conversation confrontational, which will almost never be received positively. The best way to deal with being interrupted is to handle it gracefully in the moment and if it continues to be an issue eventually address it with the person in a way that doesn't feel accusatory. A lot of people don't even realize that they're doing it or they're used to a different conversational style where it's normalized to interject when you have something to say. You can't call someone else out for being rude and expect them to be happy about it, especially if it's for something they're not aware that they're doing or that they personally don't consider rude.
I think conversation is one of those things that can't be distilled down into an exact science. You just have to figure out what is and isn't a good thing to say based on the context and they other person's behavior and tone. Any list like this will always feel off because good listening is an intuitive process.
Uhhhh no it's focusing on the fact that responding to someone in the way you describe as level 3 makes people uncomfortable. You want to put the other person at ease so you consciously avoid revealing the ways in which you've analyzed their behavior. Nobody wants to feel like they're being observed so intensely by the person they're talking to.
I think that certain aspects of the design of some electronic devices, particularly phones and tablets, are a huge part of the reason why they're so addictive. I'm specifically thinking about the screen resolution, brightly colored displays, and interactivity. How many people have you ever met who feel they have an addictive relationship to their kindle? I think if phones were grayscale e-ink displays with limited interactivity and no ability to play videos they would be much less addictive. When I turn my phone to grayscale it's immediately much less compelling.
If someone developed a new form of paper and suddenly millions of people were hooked on books published on that particular paper — wildly different books and only books printed on that kind of paper — it would make sense to conclude that there might be something about the new form of paper that's contributing to the problem. I'm sure I'm not the only one who found social media less compelling when I could only access it on a desktop computer. In my opinion the design of smartphones and tablets is not something we can just ignore when thinking about how and why they might be addictive. The devices themselves are brain candy just like the apps that run on them.
Well, yeah, but how is it not the device itself that causes it? I'm addicted to the dopamine rush from interacting with the device. The cause is both the addiction in my brain and the addictive properties of the device that gave rise to it in the first place.
I used a flip phone for a year after having had a smartphone for a decade and I felt similarly to you when I first went back to my smartphone. It was overstimulating and I hated it. I have always used an iPhone, though, and I find that they're a significantly better user experience than Android so I didn't notice the UX problems you described. More like the entire thing was just TOO MUCH COMING AT ME ALL THE TIME AHHHHHH! After a few months I was back to being addicted and it all felt normal again. I miss my flip phone a lot but life without a smartphone was just too annoying.
Basically, I despise my smartphone, but I'm still addicted to it. I use it even when I don't want to and when it prevents me from doing other things I'd rather be doing. I try to stop and eventually I always give in. It's a legitimate behavioral addiction and I believe the problem is both the design of specific apps and properties inherent to the device itself.
That's so freaky to think about! I don't have kids but I've noticed a lot of the same things in myself. If I turn the display grayscale it's like it instantly loses 80% of its allure, which has me convinced that the bright colors are a huge part of why these devices are so mesmerizing to our lizard brains. I'd imagine that that has an extra strong pull for little kids who are already drawn to bright colors!
It honestly does feel like they have magic screen powers to influence your brain. You'd likely understand what I'm talking about if you'd ever owned one. The interactivity, the high quality and brightly colored displays, the touch feedback and notifications...these devices are like brain candy. They're extremely pleasurable to use and if you get used to using them often it's very hard to pull yourself away from them.
What? They've changed massively. The displays are different sizes, they're made of different materials, they're more portable, they're more interactive, the colors are brighter, the resolution is better. Our current generation of screens are ubiquitous in a way that TV was not, and they are qualitatively different. Surely the effect on our brains could be different. Not saying that this particular study is great but I don't understand how anyone can dismiss this line of thinking as nothing more than the same moral panic Socrates once had about books, or whatever. Have you not noticed changes in your own attention span, memory, and thought processes since the advent of smartphones and tablets?
My current company has the most humane interview process I have ever experienced. When I started I was shocked by how many good engineers had stuck around for 5+ years, a few for more than 10. That's crazy for a non-FAANG non-legacy software company. It turned out to be a great sign that the company respects one's time and well-being!
I had a bunch of allergy blood tests after having an allergic reaction to kiwi fruit. My results came back "severely allergic" to almond and sesame, both of which I have eaten all my life with zero issues. No antibodies to any of the pollen I am actually allergic to or to kiwi. I didn't show any allergies to anything when they gave me a skin prick test either, despite having had hay fever my entire life, which was ultimately the cause of the kiwi allergy via oral allergy syndrome. The doctor basically shrugged and told me "allergy testing is more of an art than a science."
As someone who has been both an artist and an engineer I could not agree more. It's fascinating reading commentary on the arts from people who have always been STEM types because their entire concept of art is completely different from that of people who consider themselves artists. They constantly conflate creative problem solving and creative expression, which are two fundamentally different processes. I don't want to denigrate anyone here but I do sometimes get depressed by how artless people in the tech world are. I value art (in all its forms) because it connects human beings across space and time through our shared experience of the human condition. The best comment I've seen so far in this thread is the one about how AI art is meaningless because "AI doesn't fear death or loneliness."
I love grocery shopping! I don't get why people hate it so much. It's fun to go to the store and see what new produce or interesting ingredients they have on any given day...maybe something catches my eye and I get inspired to cook a new recipe around it. At the very least I like picking out my own produce. When I had covid I had to order groceries on Instacart and they always seemed to pick out the smallest, most bruised, most wilted, least appetizing looking produce.
The fact that you refer to "the country music industry" and not just "the music industry" makes me wonder how much of Nashville you've really experienced. I know tons of people who work in the music industry here and not one of them has anything to do with country music. Music in general has a huge pull here, whether it's for young singer-songwriters, indie bands, audio engineers, people who work in live events, videographers, etc. Most of these people tend to be extremely liberal. Nashville has plenty of problems and is severely lacking in infrastructure compared to my hometown, a large east coast city, but there are a lot of positives here that have nothing to do with cultural conservatism or country music.
I could not agree more! I'm surprised at the resistance people have to this idea. I do my best thinking during idle downtime like showering, long drives, or aimlessly walking with my dog. I've always felt like ideas needed to percolate somewhere deep down in my mind, far away from the conscious parts, so that they could burst to the surface fully-formed when my mind had the resources to receive them. I think sitting in a room alone with my thoughts for 24h sounds fun! May give it a try.
During the initial covid lockdown I lived alone. I didn't see another person face to face from the first week of March 2020 til the end of May. In the grand scheme of things it wasn't that long but by the end of that period of time I was experiencing mild hallucinations the majority of the time. I saw things moving in my peripheral vision that weren't really there and I frequently heard what I thought was music playing, but when I went to investigate it it would just be some very minor environmental noise like a tree branch scraping the side of my apartment building. I completely believe that isolation does weird things to your brain. I'm glad I didn't have to experience it any longer than that!
It's kind of the opposite of this, actually. Unlimited texting plans became widespread in the US in the 2000s because texting was incredibly popular. When I was a young teenager it was common for kids to get in trouble for racking up hundreds of dollars worth of texts each month so when carriers started offering affordable unlimited texting plans families switched to them en masse. By the time I went to college unlimited texting was a ubiquitous feature of American family phone plans. Mobile data remained extremely expensive, however, and free public wifi was pretty scarce in the US (and still is compared to Europe). At the same time free public wifi was becoming widespread in the rest of the world while unlimited texting plans remained expensive, so non-Americans started using internet-based messaging apps while Americans continued using SMS until Apple started mixing the two automatically via iMessage.
Americans definitely used Nokia phones in the 2000s btw, not to mention Asian ones like LG, Sony, etc. I never saw a cell phone in the US that didn't come with T9 word and by ~2008 full QWERTY keyboard phones were extremely popular. Texting was very easy in America in the 2000s and we did a lot of it.
> It just seems safer to do nothing and wait for the girl to make the first move.
For the most part girls will not do this. Any woman who has ever dated men eventually learns that if a man is interested he'll make it known and if you have to chase him he's not interested. For that reason most eventually give up on making the first move because those situations never go anywhere, whereas when men make the first move they do. It's not necessarily fair but it's the typical dynamic so waiting around for girls to make the first move is very unlikely to work out in your favor. Also, the thing about men being creepy for approaching is very overblown online. In real life as long as you're pleasant and polite and willing to take no for an answer most women will be happy and gracious if you approach them. Go for it!