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Comment by jalapenos | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone else get a horrible feeling inside when seeing these pointless hobby projects? Like, instead of buying a PC, spent many valuable hours doing this.

Maybe it's just because they're time rich and I'm time poor. Perhaps it's similar to how a hungry person feels when they see a food fight on TV.

Revelling in waste.

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I imagine this person got some level of enjoyment from working on this project and then seeing the end result, likely some enjoyment as well everytime they use it, or even just look at it.

Seems you are so busy you forgot what a hobby is and the enjoyment it can bring.

When you're time-poor, everything looks like a waste of time. I've been there, full time job with overtime and young kids, barely minutes a day of free time and trying to decide between coding, reading, exercise, TV, and seeing other people with 30+ hours to spend each week, throwing it away on the "dumbest" things like bottle trick shots or counting to a million on YouTube.

Things are better now. I still have less time than young people on YouTube but I'm not so stretched. I have hours a week to spend on things - sometimes with the kids.

I hope you get free of it, the crushing feeling is not nice.

Not waste; an opposite of it.

First, you can't exactly buy a PC like this. At best you can pay to have one custom-built for you.

Second, this is an exercise of some hardware skills, both mechanical and electronic. The machine, besides being a good working machine, is an excellent conversation piece, including conversations with prospective employers.

Third, it may be a rewarding pastime. If you think that pastime is useless waste, and productive work should consume 100% of your awake time, (re-)watch the movie called "The Shining" as a part of mandatory job safety training.

> you can't exactly buy a PC like this.

This. Apple's case design is unmatched.

Buying a new Mac won't give you a very good experience with (Asahi) Linux yet. ARM Windows sucks too.

This build is a self serviceable Linux dream machine.

I see the opposite, this person may have learned a lot, and enjoyed themselves in the process. And of course produced less waste.

Feel free to buy a new computer whenever you want, just don't judge those that do not.

Do we have important things to do with our free time instead, though? What alternative activity would have made you feel more comfortable? I guess maybe creating great art or curing cancer, but those things sound difficult.

Cool, you've got free time.

Cherish it. Best things in life are free; time is among them.

This is true. I do ... acceptably well at securing free time. I seem to have anxieties about it all the same. I notice a lot of the songs I listen to are about time-anxiety, such as ''Got the time'' and ''Time has come today''.

This is no playing Call of Duty after a hard day of work though. This is work.

Yes, but then I tell myself that everyone can benefit from stress-relief, and what works best for stress-relief will depend intricately on the individual.

I get the opposite feeling. That's the cool thing about hobbies: they can be totally pointless and that's ok, as long as you enjoy them. I spend time communicating with nerds using old radios and Morse code. I can't think of anything more pointless than that. But doing stuff I enjoy keeps me sane.

Would it be better to you if the person posting this was secretly paid to do this by Framework and it's an ad? (not insinuating that it is, just posing a hypothetical)

Yeah it would be

Which is interesting, because if it came out that it were paid content, I'm sure that would be a scandal in and of itself.

It's like the hungry person is now being bribed, with food, to pretend to waste it. After they finish throwing it around on camera, they can keep what they can scrape off the floor.

For some reason, the Dutch game show, De Grote Donorshow (The Great Donor Show) comes to mind, where 25 people competed to get a kidneys from one terminally ill woman.

Ha! That is awful, thank you for telling me about it.

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