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Comment by mikestorrent | Hacker News Reader

This was always the case. People obsessing over keyboards, window managers, emacs setups... always optimizing around the edges of the problem, but this is all taking an incredible amount of their time versus working on real problems.

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Yes, the thing they realize much later in life is that perhaps they enjoyed the act of gardening (curating your tools, workflows, etc) much more than farming (being downright focused and productive on the task at hand).

Sadly gardening doesn’t pay the bills!

If I only spend $1000 on hydroponics and 3 weeks tending to a vertical garden I can grow a $1 head of lettuce FOR FREE!

What if I haven’t spent anything,

and I’m making money with lettuce I grew in the woods?

(or, in Anthropic/sama’s backyards)

I tried growing lettuce in some cut up plastic bottles at university in soil from the nearby footpath, I think even with the cheap student approach I spent more on the (single pack of) seeds than a fully grown lettuce costs, and only managed about four individual leaves that were only about 1cm by 5cm.

yep, and I have the same thing, but then I am not going to tell everyone it is super productive for the actual task of farming. I say that I have a hobby farming (which I do) and talk about my tools and my meager yields (which won't make any money if sold). I am not going to say that my workflows are so productive while my neighbour who is a professional farmer just has old crap and just starts and works from 5 am to 9 pm making a living of his land.

I like farming but a lot of the tools are annoying to use so I find myself tinkering with them (gardening in your analogy I guess). It's not that I prefer tinkering in the shop to farming. More that I just have very little patience for tools that don't conform to the ways in which I think about the world.

Same thing happens in music production. If only I had this guitar, or that synth, or these plugins…

Gear Acquisition Syndrome is a very different problem. Even if you haven't cured the issue the new synth was meant to fix, at least you have a new synth.

It's the four hobbies all over again: https://brooker.co.za/blog/2023/04/20/hobbies.html

A better keyboard is a hill I will die on.

It's a keyboard attached to an article of clothing you put your head into so the keys drape over your shoulders. You then type, but also end up giving yourself a shoulder massage!

I have a fantastic keyboard, but I'm not taking pictures of it, changing the keycaps, posting about it. It's a tool, not a fetish; that's how I differentiate these things.

Yes, this happens quite often. So often that I wonder if it is among the symptoms of some psychiatric or neurological disorder.

It's just boredom probably. Obsessing over productivity tools is relatively more productive than say, something completely unrelated to your work.

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