Why Life Can’t Be Simpler
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fs.blog
Pets also add complexity to life, e.g. when you want to go away for any length of time.
An automatic feeder helps - since getting one there's always good in my cats bowl but she only eats a little at a time.
He often does this by burying the chicken drumstick under dirt and leaves, which I think is not uncommon for dogs.
(However, we always arrange for someone to take an active care of the cat, including cleaning its litterbox, if we have to leave for more than 3 days.)
No reason it couldn't be used inside, of course, but it would eventually smell more inside, versus a smaller box you scoop more frequently. (of course, you can scoop a large box frequently too, it just takes longer).
I tell myself I scoop it twice a week, but to be honest, it often ends up being more like "weekly", on garbage day.
https://www.homedepot.com/p/Plasgad-Black-Large-Concrete-Mix...
We had 3 litter boxes and they had to be scooped daily or they quickly became disgusting.
My point was that cats still need upkeep and it's really not fair to leave them living in filth for a week at a time just because someone can set up an auto-feeder.
Any pet is going to be an inconvenience if properly cared for. Doesn't mean a person can't travel, but as mentioned they will likely need to ask or pay someone to come and check on the pets.
Giant litter box is helpful but still needs to be regularly scooped.
If someone can invent a feasible self cleaning litter box (or a good way to toilet train a cat) I would love to have a cat pet, but right now the idea of them using dirty litter boxes and walking on every surface in the house is just too unappealing.
Edit: just double checked the rules for the ICE (regional fast train), if it fits in a carrier it's free of charge, a bigger dog you have to buy a child ticket for.
https://www.seat61.com/dogs-by-train.htm
> This bit is easy. You can take dogs, cats and other small animals with you free of charge on all British trains, up to a maximum of two per passenger, as long as they do not endanger or inconvenience passengers or staff. Dogs must be kept on a lead at all times unless contained in a basket. Dogs without leads, cats, birds and small animals must be carried in an enclosed basket, cage or pet carrier which must be rigid and not open (to prevent escape) and the animal able to stand and lie down in comfort. Animals and containers must not occupy seats, otherwise a charge may be made. If you want to use a Caledonian Sleeper to or from Scotland, you'll need to pay a fee, see here. For full details of dog & pet regulations on British trains see www.nationalrail.co.uk/passenger services/luggage animals.html.
Which brings us to Hacker News.
Full Disclosure: I was a cat owner, but I'm on HN for its news and the forum, I'm not particularly interested in startup companies...
[0] Toxoplasmosis has been linked to a higher likelihood of entrepreneurial behavior in people who get infected
https://www.businessinsider.com/parasite-in-cat-poop-linked-...
[1] There's a Really Weird Link Between Cats And Entrepreneurs
https://www.sciencealert.com/toxoplasma-gondii-correlation-e...
[0] https://www.purinainstitute.com/science-of-nutrition/neutral...
[1] https://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(19)30349-5/ful...
Dogs are for people that need the reassurance of the unconditional love
Cats are for people who have the kind of levels of self-confidence that makes the unconditional love of a dog both suffocatingly annoying and suspicious.
Get a terrier. Best of both worlds. You have to earn their love, and they're as prickly as cats sometimes.
But you can also take them hiking, skiing, biking, or just chilling by a campfire growling at hypothetical bears in the dark forest at night.
Yes, might be really the case. I'm pretty much a cat person and when I'm thinking about getting a dog, then terriers are pretty much on top of the list.
They are also much smarter than cats, which cat owners have problems to admit in their confidence.
A dog is something different and special
I used to think this until I got a dog. The love is not unconditional and the dog takes more work to maintain than the cat.
“Dogs are for people who want a much more interactive pet.”
Would you feel suffocated and suspicious from the unconditional love of your child? Its not about reassurance, its just that it is a beautiful experience in this life, and i give just as much love back to my dog.
if you view disinterested cats as the ideal relationship, I hope you can separate that from your human relationships
Do I detect catholic guilt ?
If you think your cat is randomly mean to you, then you really don't understand your cat, you don't correctly read the clues it signalizes to you.
If I'm e.g. petting my cat and don't stop if she starts wagging her tail, which pretty much means she's overexcited, then she will scratch me to make it more clear to me.
To expect that your cat is all the time interested in you also seems honestly quite a bit narcissistic.
Maybe I'm being too generous since I am using dogs as a reference point.
They are incredibly annoying
But are funny
That's why people keep them
(I got two)
Edit: if they can roam freely they are also a threat to many other life forms and bio diversity
They are the most prolific mass murderers of animals in the western world. My vegetarian (cat owning) friend got very upset when I pointed this out.
* YMMV. You might need to live in a developed world that assures you won't be left to die, that is not at war, that you can find a way to sustain yourself, and that you're not involved in any accidents that drastically change your otherwise simple life.
In fact, all the complexity appears when there is peace. People do not save or study or anything secondary when there is war.
Are you going to study when you don't know where your family is? When your mother or sister or daughter has been raped and you have to protect her for being raped or killed? When they go after you because you abandoned guerrilla (or the army)?
You make a simple mistake(like looking weak, with no friends or too smart) and you die, it was as simple as that. A kid without beard with an automatic gun does not like or respect you? You are dead.
People at war, they need something, they take it(with automatic weapons). Super simple.
In China things were also super simple. When I was there a biker was hit by a car and died. Nobody gave a dam. Cars were circulating as usual around the dead person. It was the most brutal thing I ever saw in my life, including Congo, in Congo people cared more about each other.
It is the developed world that is complex and sophisticated. People work for abstract things like "career", "pensions", "tenure" or even paper money that are promises that don't really exist as real things but really are symbols of trust in the society.
BTW you feel alive living at the moment and I personally miss some part of that, even when I was risking my life.
Dying is simple, life living is harder.
That is not actually true. Most people in war zone are civilians without weapons. The survival depends a lot on navigating power structures and negotiating. And luck. But it is not simple and everyone speculates.
> When your mother or sister or daughter has been raped and you have to protect her for being raped or killed?
How exactly would you protect them? You don't. Cause I had relatives survive war and read memoirs from civilians and it was more that everyone was looking for source of income. If males had to join army or guerilla (or died), then it is women trying to survive and trying to care for those who stayed (children, old, themselves). And that is not simple.
> Are you going to study when you don't know where your family is?
Hardly. But school systems in war countries and occupied countries do somehow move on, as malfunctioning as they are. People leave them to search for income and food. People clinge on activites too.
Mental health issues get worst under those conditions. The conflicts between people escalate while everyone being even more dependent on each other. People live in cramped conditions. And none of that is simple. Living in one household with mentally ill or abusive relative you would normally cut off is opposite of simple.
> When they go after you because you abandoned guerrilla (or the army)?
Majority are civilians.
Status is something we choose to opt-in to. You can choose to ignore it as well.
What would you need to see to conclude that life in China for local people is as complex as for American living in United States?
I am not even differencing rural part of old school China from rich inhabitant of Beijing.
It's not an intrinsic property of technology, either. It's just businesses that want to take advantage of you in new and more abusive ways. Don't let them.
Saving time on tasks to give yourself more time to do other things only works if you have complete autonomy over your schedule.
Technology allows us to experience things that wouldn't be possible otherwise. And your word processor can indeed save you enough time to do other things you want to do with your life. And if word processors and overstimulation are not your things, you can go to a Zen monastery, technology have your back: food, medicine, construction, transportation,... so you can meditate in peace.
I have known several people who live a simple life. Small house in the middle of nowhere, no phone signal, grow their own crops, etc... But they still have a car, go out to town to buy stuff that come out of large factories, they have a few electric devices powered by solar panels, etc... They take advantage of technology and people love of word processors to live their simple life, and that's fine! That's what technology is for, to allow those who want to disconnect to do so without putting their life at risk, and to give a dopamine rush to those who can't stay still.
Not if you're part of the massive destruction of wildlife wrought by these biodiversity annihilators masquerading as cute pets.
'As an invasive species[1] and superpredator,[2] they do considerable ecological damage.[2] In Australia, hunting by cats helped to drive at least 20 native mammals to extinction,[3] and continues to threaten at least 124 more.[3] Their introduction has caused the extinction of at least 33 endemic species on islands throughout the world.[2] Feral and domestic cats kill billions of birds in the United States every year, where songbird populations continue to decline.[4]'
If you aim lower.
There was a psychology research on how people even billionaire form a baseline similar to a homeless dude. All the stress, pressure you have is the same as everybody else and it will never change.
So the goal should be do whatever you enjoy while doing the minimum effort..
Of course this type of thinking would immediately hamper progress everywhere.
What? I can’t see it being a good invention driver for anything other than the category of “tools for lazy people”. How was the invention of the OLED driven by laziness? How about the high bypass turbofan?
Examples include: autocomplete, spell check, version control, undo, in-house running water, washing machines, Zoom.
Just to name a few random examples, the list is obviously gigantic.
Making a tool that helps people do work more efficiently is not targeting lazy people. A person is not lazy if they want to do a job more efficiently and eliminate wasted effort. A person is lazy if they don’t want to do work at all.
A smart writer uses spellcheck because people make mistakes and spellcheck is a lot cheaper than a proofreader. A lazy writer doesn’t bother writing in the first place.
It's proven that "doing nothing" helps with creative thinking. The inventions you are talking about are a product of both hard work and laziness.
You can't solve a problem by staring at your screen and thinking really, really hard for 10 hours. The solution will come to you a few hours later during a shower or a walk.
> "tools for lazy people"
1) From the biological standpoint all tools are for lazy people. Lazy animals spend less resources, which in turn could be used for creating more lazy animals.
2) Our brain is wired to be lazy. This impacts both how we approach problems (form stronger neural pathways or move between system I and system II to use D. Kahneman's example) and how we avoid them (e.g. cognitive biases)
3) The distinguishing feature of humans as animals is that we create tools and become dependent on them.
On a less serious note, I'd say that 90% of my programming work is driven by laziness.
For instance, I test things in advance or design them in a certain way so I don't need to worry about them in the future.
This allows me for focus on more challenging problems. These at some point become boring chores. So "I test things in advance or design them in a certain way so I don't need to worry about them in the future." Rinse and repeat.
The kind of "doing nothing" that helps with creative thinking is very different from the kind of "doing nothing" that results from laziness.
> On a less serious note, I'd say that 90% of my programming work is driven by laziness. For instance, I test things in advance or design them in a certain way so I don't need to worry about them in the future.
That's not being lazy, that's long-term thinking and defering gratification – which is the opposite of what people typically mean by the term "laziness". In your post, you're conflating two concepts:
1) Defering productive work until a later time to free time for near-term non-productive activities ("being lazy").
2) Spending more resources (time, energy) near-term to be more efficient overall ("being inventive").
> The kind of "doing nothing" that helps with creative thinking is very different from the kind of "doing nothing" that results from laziness.
I agree, but that's not how I read the parent post. I'm curious to see how you'd describe this distinction though.
One kind of "doing nothing" frees your mind to discover solutions and interesting ideas in a background process. Examples include talking a walk, talking a shower, or just sitting around and letting your mind wander.
The other kind of "doing nothing" occupies your mind with low-effort thought processes. Examples include watching TV or reading a book. This isn't necessarily a negative thing, but your mind won't be solving problems (unless you're not really focusing on the movie or the book).
You then went on a tangent about downtime being responsible for thinking. That has zero relationship with laziness.
You only need to look to students to see how spending intellectual effort exploring ideas requires energy. Huge chunks complain about anything that requires open ended problem solving. You become blind to this as a knowledge worker who has honed that skill in the same way a plumber becomes blind to the difficulty of sweating pipes together.
Again, the high bypass turbofan and OLED were not created out of laziness. Many critical ideas were likely matured during downtime, but that’s not laziness.
All math proofs pushing the boundaries of the field of math have approximately no practical application leading to inventions to help mathematicians be lazy. Nobody is taking a crack at the Riemann hypothesis because they’re too lazy to do the dishes.
Turbofan is way out of my area of expertise. Still, I guess planes are less hard than breeding, riding a thousand horses, sailing ships, and so. And waiting, waiting is not for lazy.
High bypass turbofans did not displace the horse either. Planes were flying before they came into use.
You’re not making the point you think you are.
Yes. Would it be a problem though? If everybody is happy with what they have, then progress is unnecessary or even harmful.
Then next year, a draught and famine strikes, killing thousands or even hundreds of thousands.
Is it a problem? Is it harmful? Depends on your philosphy.
I feel that psychedelics and spending all the time in meditation are just low-tech versions of wireheading.
I'd say that meditation is the best version of wireheading currently known to humanity. I admit that due to obvious problems with measuring happiness, this hypothesis is hard to test.
You make just enough efforts to go where you need / want. The rest is superfluous.
And modern society, lifting you into a form of comfort, also ties you to an large body of strings that forbid you to work on your gong fu (whatever task/effort you deeply need to do to feel happy).
It replaces risk with anguish
Depends on the definition of progress, which as a term by itself is meaningless.
More technological progress? It might hamper that.
More progress towards happier and less stressed people? It might improve that - and other dimensions, e.g. environment, equality, democracy, etc.
But hey, they made a 15th iphone too and a 30th avengers film, so I guess it's all good...
Nobody who has ever dealt with the United States Government, or any US State government, can tell me with a straight face that the principle is absolute.
Or, put another way, I'll gladly give up all the choices that lead to misery every time I deal with the IRS or DMV in exchange for things to be as simple as they are in other countries I've visited.
Choice is not the only cause of complexity.
In any event, Governments are bad examples because they serve more interests than just “customers.” They are not businesses and it is destructive to compare them as such
"Right now, you have $475 in your bank account. We can set up an easy payment plan at $150 per month plus 3% interest per month if you like, with automatic deduction. If that's OK with you, just say "Yes"."
Basically, automatically giving options to the users based on access to data they should already have. Detecting the car is not even needed, just scan the driver license at a terminal and get going.
DMV does not need to have direct access to your bank account, but can simply hand off the total to your banking app (say), which in turn can then offer the easy payment plan. Some credit cards already offer this option today.
In general, life can be made quite simple with technology without also having to give up choices or privacy. The hard part is convincing the tech companies/govt IT bureaucracy to go this way :)
This is done to maximize the interest...
So I can definitely imagine another autority waiting for years before squeezing you dry.
Last time I renewed my drivers license, I had to visit the DPS (Texas separates licensing people and cars, so DPS is for people) three times. In person. During a pandemic. Because of failings on the part of the DPS. This is typical.
But it seems so obviously false. A "hello world" program could fetch every character from a separate database; same output but enormously more complex process.
A small car could have 16 wheels, 2 engines, and be controlled by typing commands on a keypad ("steer left 3 degrees").
Don't tell me these examples are just exposing some complexity that was already there, or that complexity is a conserved constant, etc.
It's amazing what can be made to sound plausible with an erudite wiring style.
That said, it feels like there is likely some sort of Pareto efficient frontier with regards to complexity vs. usefulness. You can certainly have a poorly-designed system which is arbitrarily more complex without being anymore useful. But if you make things "as simple as possible" for any given amount of complexity, there will always be some underlying trade-off.
Brings to mind → https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-a...
In the same way that a probability represents your state of information about an event or action your assessment of the complexity of a task or problem is a function of your state of information and relevant expertise.
I think this has implications for models like cynefin where the assignment to a domain (simple, complicated, complex, chaotic) is presented as objective but I believe this assessment if a function of your information and understanding.
One implication for designing software is to use familiar UI metaphors--which are viewed as simpler and easier to use.
One implication for competitive analysis is that you cannot assume that your competitors bring the same information and level of understanding to a problem that you do. In best case you have more information and expertise. In the case you need to anticipate, you have less information and expertise, and what looks complex or chaotic to you may be complicated to a competitor.
This is knife vs bread cutting machine stuff.
Only up to a constant. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity
The first step to advanced simplicity is making it easy to do again what you did already. This is the "reorder last shopping cart" level.
The next step is to have a good understanding of what people are likely to re-order, and how often. Some marketing systems are starting to get this. If, last time, you ordered a hammer and some nails, next time you should be offered more nails, but not more hammers.
One obstacle to advanced simplicity is cross-vendor integration. This is why more than one remote is often necessary. There are entertainment systems that self-configure when plugged in, but only from one vendor.
Being the middleman between two people who you love but hate each other is complex. Telling someone who is smart enough to do a job but hasn't been performing that they aren't getting their contact renewed is complex. Figuring out why your two year old is crying is sometimes flat out impossible. Setting up kubernetes or reading processes for what forms to bring the DMV? Annoying, but manageable. If those were the only complexities in my life, it would be simple indeed. Less rich, but simple.
It’s human factors i.e. being caught by FBI and associated anxiety that add complexity to the situation.
Darlene has to remind her of the simplicity of the task.
This had a big impact on me, as someone who has struggled with anxiety in the past.
Many people are aware of life feeling too complicated, but very few actually have thought about what life would feel like if it were simple, and once they think about what they would need to get rid of in order to make life feel simple, most are unwilling to give up the privileges and freedom afforded to them by their "complex" lives.
It's almost obvious complexity can be created. So why it can't be destroyed as well?
"Accidental complexity relates to problems which engineers create and can fix; for example, the details of writing and optimizing assembly code or the delays caused by batch processing. Essential complexity is caused by the problem to be solved, and nothing can remove it; if users want a program to do 30 different things, then those 30 things are essential and the program must do those 30 different things."
There is no "life". It's an ideology, and letting the idea rule you too strictly will turn you into an ideologue. It's our mind that sorts our infinitely complex realities out, but also inevidably finds itself tangled in its own abstractions.
Emotionally, happiness can only be felt in moments. Days where happy moments outnumber the sadder moments could be considered a happy day. But to then extend this to a lifespan is just too ambitious to be practical. It's surreal.
Once you have happiness in your days, living a day at a time should suffice. And once you have happiness at arms reach, knowing that should suffice. That is a good place. That is one better model of a good "life".
I agree with the quote but I am not able to reconcile it with the following observations...
1. The Unix philosophy insists on making simple tools which focus on doing just one thing and only one thing. Edit: Come to think of it, simple tools can simplify a complex process if you can compose them into a complex tool to do the job.
2. I think this also runs counter to Apple's understanding of simple too (one button mouse anyone?).
unrar l "$1" | tail -n +9 | head -n -3 | awk '{$1=$2=$3=$4=""; print $0}'One is entirely subjective and the other isn't.
Example: a typical CLI application might be incredibly complicated to my mother, while it is in fact much less complex than e.g. a GUI software she uses to make and order picture books, which to her is much less complicated.
Something being complicated to someone doesn't mean it is complex. Very simple things can be complicated, very complex things can be simple.
I read his book "The design of everyday things" after hearing a lot of people speak highly of it.
I found it quite underwhelming.
Anyone have insight of what people think is so noteworthy about that book?
If his work in something like "Design of Everyday Things" seems underwhelming I would guess that is because it has become so influential that you already have absorbed a lot of the ideas in the book. You certainly live in a world that is slightly shaped by them. As a teacher, Norman constantly taught through anecdotes about the way things work.
ATMs used to give you money and then after they gave you money they would return your card. The model for the bank was take card, do transaction, return card. The problem was people kept leaving their cards in the machine. Donald Norman pointed out that the "mental model" for people was go to atm-> get money. Once the last step is accomplished the customer doesn't thinks they are done. They don't want to keep thinking about the ATM. "Mental Model" of an interface is a term you may have heard and he coined.
Now every time I go to an ATM and it gives me my card back before the money, I think of him.
I would agree the book has little in terms of practical advice nowadays. It was brief and straightforward at the time, and age has only lessened the impact.
Later in life I was a video game designer and every time I had to make a UX decision I channeled Donald Norman.
but many ATMs were designed with a business goal of confiscating cards.
For instance, having a zillion inter-related modes creates internal and external complexity without improving functionality at all. Using orthogonal controls helps a lot.
And new systems resulting out of old understood ones, like SI-Units vs imperial units
Would it make sense to have more fields visible at once? Maybe making users not have to dig though 10 pages to find the “Covid” checkbox would be better.
Would it make sense to have a single schema monolith with simple HTML forms vs microservices, 100 schemas, persistent connections, streaming, and burn-rate-heavy cloud infrastructure?
Do you need all of those JS libraries that look simple but are actually more complex than vanilla JS to setup and maintain?
Object storage seemed simple, but how will you translate all of that JSON later when the model must change over and over again?
Is that code that uses lambdas and annotation-based cloud logging that is so much more readable and maintainable generating frequent delays for customers due to GC and latency than the loop and shared variable equivalent that writes to file?
Counter-examples: code that could be simplified without cost, storing customer data whose structure is out of your control, use of well-maintained libraries that save time and add value, and relatively low cost use of the cloud services due to good planning and design.
Because of the politicians and lawyers with their complicated, convoluted laws.
I am not the person who demands of me that I obey all these stupid laws.