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Comment by zdw | Hacker News Reader

The cure for this angst is to know the consequences of your decisions, and to accept them as being made with the best intentions at the time.

For example, I regularly work with no less than 7 different OS combinations (OS X, OpenIndiana, Windows, Linux, OpenBSD, iOS, FreeBSD), and don't hesitate to recommend different ones in different circumstances.

To recommend software or hardware without at least passing knowledge of the merits of alternative solutions is frankly negligent. For example, I don't have any Android devices (mainly because of the software upgrade issues), but I know situations where I'd definitely recommend them.

Living in a tech monoculture, whatever it may be, isn't healthy.

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Nah, the cure for this angst is not to care so much about whatever consumer electronics you're using.

My phone is a bit crappy. There are definitely better ones on the market. But I don't care, it does the job. There are better TVs than my TV, better ovens than my oven and better vacuum cleaners than my vacuum cleaner, but they all do the basic job for which I bought 'em and their imperfections don't cause me any huge grief, so who cares?

> Nah, the cure for this angst is not to care so much about whatever consumer electronics you're using.

I dunno. I see non-technical friends and relatives choose the wrong devices out of ignorance pretty regularly. They waste hours of their weeks fartzing with text messages that are much more difficult to type out, having trouble reading email from people they want to interact with, and spending lots of their hard earned money on other things like external cameras that are mostly unnecessary when you have a decent camera on your phone and learn how to use it properly.

I'm here with my in-laws this week and one of the problems I've noticed is that they paid for the lease of a really crummy wifi router from their ISP. The darned thing doesn't even let them Skype with their grandkids on their iPad unless they're in the same room. To compensate, they have to either go out and spend more of their fixed income on a new router or just not get the benefit of the technology that they've pretty much paid for (but bought the wrong one of).

Like most things in life, knowing when to spend the time and energy to care and when to just make due isn't an easy no-brainer.

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