Guilty Displeasures | Hacker News Reader

Guilty Displeasures

hopefulmons.com

121 pointsaregue115 comments

Probably the most obvious for this community is being very enthusiastic about technology but loathing anything with "smart" in the name. (I still use a flip phone and 15+ year old appliances)

Similarly I grew up always enjoying video games but it feels like a burned out husk in the modern era. Most of the big dollar "video game" market is now just MTX gambling and even a LAN party probably routes everything through Steam or Epic's servers

Good news: video games are still fucking awesome. Since it costs nothing to make one, weird and smart and cool people from all across the world are trying the craziest stuff. It's true they're purchasable through steam, mostly. But there's spectacularly creative stuff at low or no cost. For example, skimming my steam right now I see:

- Tales From Off Peak City (surrealist walking simulator with a film camera mechanic; 9.99$)

- Baba is You (sokoban puzzler; 14.99$)

- Straftat (brutalist/surrealist competitive shooter set to jungle music focusing on randomized community-map style alternative fps gamemodes; free)

- Untitled Goose Game (light puzzle coop set to dynamically scored classical piano music; 8.99$)

- Norco (prescient pre-gen-ai pixel art VN about AI, faith, and the environment; 5.24$)

- Brazillian Drug Dealer 3: I opened a Portal To Hell In The Favela Trying To Revive Mit Aia I Need to Close It (it's quake; 3.75$)

Straftat is made by two French brothers but the name is German, meaning criminal act / criminal offense / felony. It's a fun choice of name.

+1 For Untilted Goose Game, it's wholesome and brilliant, also as a solo game.

I agree with you with respect to smart, cloud, etc

I think we should support people who are uncomfortable about this stuff, don't ridicule them with "tinfoil hat much?" type sentiments

By the way, GOG.com treats you well wrt cloud/privacy/etc. All games they sell are drm-free and can be downloaded, installed and played offline.

With regards to GOG and privacy, though, it's worth noting that GOG write that they "may use Google Adwords, Doubleclick, Sizmek Versatag, Yandex.Metrica, Twitter Pixel or Facebook Pixel and other similar technologies" as well as "Google Analytics, Google Optimize, Matomo, Hotjar", and that they incorporate either the privacy or cookie or ad policy of most of these services by reference into their own cookie policy: https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000498685-Cooki... So if they really are a privacy- and consumer-oriented company, that must be the slip-up of the century.

But if your games don't need a network interface, who cares?

maybe on their website (which you can block, unless you use google/etc payment methods)

I just put some money in a gog wallet once, then block everything and talk to gog only for browsing, buying games, etc

I resonate with what you said, but I kinda don't know what it has to do with the article

The article defines guilty displeasures as things you don't like but you hope you like. I don't think you hope yourself to like modern AAA games.

Different person's POV here: I fully expect from my mind to enjoy video games.

Then I open Steam, and feel the strong sense of rejection, like eww this is well and truly a disgusting selection of repackaged Unity assets, and I'd like to have absolutely none of that please.

It's this cognitive dissonance maybe, that's the guilty displeasure. Because I do keep coming back, we all do.

In the grim darkness of the right now, with former gaming companies focusing on live services and loot boxes and advertising, core gamers' very conception of video games is simulacra, a copy without the original.

With time, this will fade; like when searching for Jesus, you don't really expect to physically find the dude hidden in the corner of the church. Expectations decay.

Maybe I will visit Steam on the Internet Archive and still browse, when everything is gone and dead, and the guilty displeasure feeling will have outlived the displeasure, and the guilt.

Sounds nice, but it doesn't fit. Games are awesome right now. There are so many and so many good ones. You can play the free ones Epic releases each week and have a good selection only by that. Baldur's Gate 3 was already mentioned and is not only indeed really good, it's only the tip of the iceberg: There was a resurgence of CRPGs the last years. Including some offsprings, like Disco Elysium. A game so awesome that all "games were better in the past" statements immediately get disproved. If that's not your genre no problem, all genres thrive currently.

Sure, there are games with repackaged Unity assets on Steam. But it's on you if you just open steam and browse the new releases. Go by proper game reviews or recommendations by friends with similar taste, which has always been the right way to go, even three decades ago.

I despise smartphones (and related), but they're really incredible hardware and software, I SHOULD like them, a lot. Imagine being a nerd in the 90s and getting access to this tiny computer running on 3 volts of battery power that's 10x more powerful than your desktop. Holy crap.

I'm even somewhat resentful of modern games, I feel like they should be... more fun? More often then not I just kind of throw something old in an emulator and play that. My comment might have come across as the opposite but I think it can be interpreted either way.

"I should be enjoying this stuff, why does it suck so bad now?" Is probably the vibe we're trying to get at here.

I consider myself a minimalisr so I should love smart phones. I carry more stuff with to avoid using them

Depends on what sort of games you are into, but Baldur's Gate 3 is modern and amazing. Great single player campaign with mod support. No DLCs or expansion packs, you get it all in the base game, finished, done.

It's not a guilty displeasure. I get annoyed by smart stuff. It's grating to deal with a smart TV demanding more attention than a display deserves. Over time we just stopped trusting that technology will better our lives.

Dogs - I know they are good for humanity with getting their owners for walks, loyalty, etc. But have no idea how people get hooked on them with the picking up hot feces and 25% chance of getting a barking/jumping lunatic that you have to rearrange your life every 6 hours around their bathroom habits...

You need to have one to understand the unconditional loyalty, love, and the bond. You come to appreciate it even more once you lose them. Having a dog is the best and worst thing in the world. Just lost our fur baby a week ago...

The unconditional loyalty and love is what disgusts me about dogs. Unconditional renders it meaningless and worthless.

It's actually not that unconditional, and is something you have to work for. They will of course be happy that you come from work and show affection as they are social animals, but there are definitely different levels of affection even within a single household.

Don't sell yourself short, I'm sure you could alienate a dog.

Try cats.

A joke I read recently: "A fortune teller told me I was going to experience the most terrible heartbreak in twelve years time. This totally bummed me out, so I got a dog to cheer me up."

From your description, I will assume you never had a dog as none of what you said happens like that

I'm mixed. I always wanted a dog as an adult because I grew up with dogs. But, maybe because it was a different time, the dogs didn't run our lives. Serially, they lived in our backyard. They had access to a dog house in the garage. And we gave them food and played with them. I was also a kid so no idea what my parents went through but I certainly didn't see them fretting over the dog and we rarely if ever took them for a walk.

But now I see any of my friend and family that have dogs re-arrange their lives around them. One friend will never stay out more than 2 hours because "gotta get back to the dogs". So, dinner and a movie is out since that would be more than 2 hours. A family member is similar, gotta get home for the dogs. This family member would also not be ok to check them into a dog hotel for a longer family vacation so we haven't had one in 10 years.

So, seeing examples like these and others, I haven't been able to convince myself to do it. I kept waiting until I had a house with a yard like I grew up in but that never happened.

You don't pick up your dog's poop? You don't take them out regularly? I mean sure, there are scenarios where these aren't true, but for the vast majority of dog owners, it very much does happen like that.

I have never had a dog and I have still picked up hot dog poop just from walking a relative’s dog. I assume you have yours toilet trained.

The same reason people generally don't regret having kids even though the commitment and overall change of your life are much greater than what you described for dogs.

Expressing regret about having kids is, in addition, a strong social taboo.

You're comparing actual humans to a pet?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciesism

How is saying that your biological offspring is different to a pet discrimination/unfair treatment?

What are you asking? Nchagnet is just acknowledging the existence of people who regret having kids, not making a value comparison

Yeah, a few friends of mine have dogs, and they fall very much into the "nice to visit, wouldn't want to live there" category for me.

Other people's dogs are my favorite dogs.

I find myself in this weird cross-section of software devs who do enjoy coding, but also love experimenting with new AI stuff and I don't quite care yet if it's more or less efficient.

It feels more efficient and feels like I'm outputting much better products with it. Indeed I feel like I am able to tackle harder, more encompassing problems than I otherwise could.

It may take my job, but tbh I'm having fun on the ride there.

So while I do enjoy coding, it's not the end-all, be-all for me.

Remember that feeling when you successfully wrote, debugged and ran your first useful program ? I think we are always chasing after that feeling in our own way with our little side projects.

Using AI is probably the fastest and shortest way to get that feeling(or dopamine hit) repeatedly if you let go of a little control on code.

I just hope in the long run AI doesn't take away that thrill and joy when it stops being a novelty and challenge.

I think it can go both ways. I have made things that made me feel bad for not truly understanding what I made and I disliked the process.

But I’ve also been really wanting to make my laptop’s NixOS config into a flake and make it nicely modular. I’ve watched some YouTube, read some posts, but never properly made the jump. There was always something wrong.

But now. Claude code has helped me over the hill, explaining every edit. Every step. And I’m really happy with the result. I see that I was just stuck on some small things now.

You're not alone! I love hand-writing code, I love solving the puzzles that come along with it, but I'm having a blast learning how to apply all these new tools.

I have a backlog of project ideas going back two decades and one thing that's common to a lot of them is the startup cost. Many of them would have been multiple weekends worth of pure bootstrapping work just to get to the interesting parts, and I've tread that setup ground too many times to learn anything new from it, so they didn't happen.

Now, often I can pull one of those ideas off the backlog, have some back and forth with an agent, and get a project structure and a build script and a test target unique to my needs for free, and it doesn't have to involve turning my thinking over to the machine completely. I get to write clean code by hand and I get to think about the interesting problems. It just means that I don't need to learn the configuration file format for yet another damn environment until I absolutely need to dig into it, which may never happen. Yeah they tend to be bad at novel stuff, yeah they "regurgitate the training set" to whatever degree that that's true, but that's okay, I'm good at the novel stuff and I'm still present at the keyboard to do that. Cloning a template and following a setup README also "regurgitates the training set" but takes longer and is boring after the millionth time you do it. I've learned so much more now that I can skip the stuff that's always the same.

Sure vibe-coding tends to create code that's awful to read and maintain but so do I when I only care about getting the result. I had a need the other day to one-time export a bunch of data from a proprietary application with no built-in export and without the source available. I have absolutely no interest in learning how to use the Apple accessibility APIs, and even less interest in learning them well enough to create "good" code, so I let an agent make the script and I got the result I wanted in twenty minutes. And I got the result faster than a junior might because I knew exactly what to ask for and how to iterate on it. And then I got to spend my time on the interesting part.

I have no idea how new engineers going forward are going to develop the reflexes and intuition that I built up before all this new tech was available. Maybe we really are on the edge of a breakthrough that really truly obviates that need entirely, and then we're out of a job. In the meantime it does feel like we invented a bicycle for the mind, the energy of every manual step translating into ten effortless strides that can take you in the complete wrong direction if you let it, or faster than ever towards a concrete goal.

The caveat to all of this is that I am already very deeply tired of nearly every other use of AI. For example in the last day the front page of HN has been bombarded with vibe-coded apps, which I don't even automatically have a problem with, but now often the author comes in here and shits all over the replies with slobbering LLM-ism responses. Multi-paragraph gish-gallop answers that say absolutely nothing, and liability for truth deferred to the machine, shrugging shoulders of metal and silicon. It was pleasant when everyone on the internet had a real voice. Even very considered writing had a natural variance to tone and cadence and vocabulary. Now it feels like I'm alone, and being stalked around the internet by some singular cheerful demon producing ugly, tasteless, marketing-speak drivel.

Most anime is either a guilty pleasure or a guilty displeasure for me. The stuff I like, I feel embarrassed of the part of me that likes it, and I feel embarrassed about what I'm willing to overlook to enjoy it. Then the stuff I don't like, I feel closed-minded about it, like what's wrong with me that I'm too stuffy to enjoy it or too dumb to get it. But I don't have friends or acquaintances who are into it, so it never comes up with other people, and I generally don't think about it.

Oh I understand this one too much as a fan of the Isekai genre. So much slop and poorly done power fantasies. But some amazing content in there. Then I look at something like One Piece and not really vibing with it at all despite being overwhelmingly popular.

I'm just so glad I'm past the phase where I'd worry about these things. It's very exhausting.

Came here to say the same. At first I couldn't even relate, but then another phase of my life came flashing back to me. All the angst around the pretense, wondering why I like somethings in a particular space but then not others that I was supposed to like...

And then slowly over time the realization that most people were in the same boat and it's just virtue signaling

Now I like what I like, I don't like what I don't like

I wouldn't say I feel guilt about all of these necessarily, but I do have a list of things I don't like that I would expect "someone like me" to like:

- The Lord of the Rings (try being a geeky Catholic who finds LotR tedious)

- Fantasy stories generally (though I love sci-fi)

- Chess

- Scrabble

- Rubik's cubes

- Video games

- Listening to music (I sing in a choir, but I don't like listening to music--any of it--even the kinds of music I like to sing)

I've never been interested in contrived puzzles like Rubik's cubes or even crosswords - but an actual real puzzle like "why does this call fail 1% of the time" could keep me enthralled for days/weeks until I either found the cause or was told to stop... Sadly no longer in that kind of work.

Young Me, a voracious reader, was defeated several times by the LOTR books. To this day, I doubt I could force myself to read dozens of pages of Tom Bombadil singing about trees.

Also Neil Stephenson, come to think of it. I believe that I've absorbed enough of Snow Crash and Diamond Age via nerd culture to provide summaries of both but oof, I couldn't finish either of them.

In theory I'm ok with drugs being legalized, but I will admit that I have a strong distaste for people who routinely use drugs and drug culture.

I'm not talking about people who drink during the holidays or smoked weed in high school, those people don't bother me. I'm talking about the people who need to lecture about how great weed is and feel the need to smoke it every day and make it a vital part of their identity. I find people like that insufferable. I think the people wearing cannabis-leaf t shirts are generally annoying, and I hate how everyone who smokes a joint and watches a Carl Sagan video seems to decide that they're a philosopher.

I'm a pretty boring American liberal, I think drugs should be legal, but I guess that's more in an abstract sense, sort of a NIMBY thing. I'm ok with people doing drugs, as long as I don't have to deal with those people and they do it far away from me.

I acknowledge the hypocrisy in this. Can't help how I feel.

This is entirely normal. I think jet skis and French arthouse cinema should be legal, I just don't want either of them anywhere near me.

I mean, sure, but I still think it's kind of hypocritical for me to act like weed should be legal and no one should be arrested for it and all that stuff, only to get mad at them for doing the things that I said they should be allowed to do.

French arthouse cinema is indeed something I also dislike, but that's also something that's pretty passive so if one opened up a block from me I wouldn't really care. When a dispensary opened up a block for me (after I voted "yes" on the legislation that legalized weed), I was genuinely pretty annoyed. Now a large chunk of my neighborhood perpetually smells like marijuana, and while a lot of people claim they like that small, I am not one of them.

I dunno, I feel a bit hypocritical about this. I have gotten drunk (though not in several years) but I've never done any other fun drugs, so maybe this is some internalized jealousy on my end.

Seems fine. Loud music should be legal. Loud music in my neighbourhood 24/7? No.

Why French - isn't this more a reaction to directors like Godard that can come off edgy and pretentious?

I mostly just don’t like arthouse cinema in general and was using the previous commenter’s example.

Ah I see, I don't love all arthouse but the ones that resonate impart a sense of wonder, empathy, travel (time and space) so was surprised to see it here.

> I think the people wearing cannabis-leaf t shirts are generally annoying, and I hate how everyone who smokes a joint and watches a Carl Sagan video seems to decide that they're a philosopher.

Oh god. You just reminded me of my last "smoke buddy". Someone I tolerated because we got high together. He was definitely the type to watch some shit he didn't understand and have some sort of revelation. One of the last before I cut ties with him was about how he believed the earth would one day "become another sun". The earth is getting all of this energy over time from the sun, so it will eventually have enough energy to become a sun itself! He was really proud of that one.

Yeah, in high school I had a pothead acquaintance who got mad at me when I said that I knew more about physics then he did, because I had actually taken physics classes, and I too had seen the same Carl Sagan videos he had. He didn't know any of the math behind physics, and as far as I'm aware he wasn't some kind of Ramanujan savant (considering he wasn't in any advanced classes), but I guess he felt that he was so smart because he would get high and watch Cosmos or listen to Alan Watts.

He might have been smarter than me (not too high of a bar to cross), but I stand by my point that in order to be good at physics you have to, you know, actually learn physics

That's not NIMBYism or hypocrisy. It's just liberalism. You don't like something, but you think it should be legal. That is exactly what liberalism is about. You do not have to like everything and in fact, if you only want to allow things that you like, you're not liberal. It's precisely the acknowledgement of other people's right to do things that you do not like that defines liberalism. But at the same time you have the right to not associate with people who do these things. You give them their freedom and they give you yours. There is nothing hypocritical about that.

Also some of the things you describe are just addiction and coping, euphemizing it.

Alice in Chains for me. I developed my taste for music in the 90s and love the grunge and punk from that era, but just not AIC. I can't explain way exactly, just drives me batty.

+1 but I don't see that as a guilty displeasure to be honest. I also formed most of my musical taste in the 90s and to this day Dirt, Sap and Jar of Flies sound just as good as they did back in the day.

It was Deftones for me.

I love Deftones and Alive in Chains. both quintessential bands of my teen years

I was obsessed with a handful of Deftones songs back in the day. But outside those, I just couldn't get into them wholesale. I think they just weren't heavy enough for me. Now I'm old, and one of my mates is a huge Alice in Chains fan, and he showed me their ropes (I didn't know much prior). I'm very into them now. It's the same with a lot of bands that were before my time. My dad loves Dire Straights, and I thought they were OK when I was younger. I appreciate them at a different level now.

Not sure what my point is.

For me it's Soundgarden. All I can hear are songs that are almost brilliant but then they seemed to deliberately ruin them.

For OP's calibration since he is working on “that problem”

> A younger version of myself felt guilty at disliking reading scientific papers. Then I realized I just didn’t want to be a scientist, and stopped caring. (Also, I realized that nobody really enjoys it, so it’s kind of a moot point; when I realized this I tried to solve the problem for everybody, and now work for a startup that is making real progress against this problem.)

(my emphasis)

I did enjoy reading papers, a lot. I wish I had had more time for it. I don't think your mental model is substantiated.

I also have problems reading math, even though I work in a math heavy field. I have no problem with actually understanding math, just with forcing myself to read the symbols.

My problem stems from being very good at speedreading, being hyperlexic, and since I was a kid I devour books very fast, and I cannot transfer that skill completely to math and this disappoints me.

I know very good mathematicians who have problems reading both literature and math, and because there is no discrepancy, they don't experience it in a "I hate math" way as I do.

I actually managed to apply my "superpower" by reading a lot of what smart people say about math (e.g. introductions to papers, long mathoverflow answers, blog posts) and thus I internalized a lot of math thinking processes without actually doing the work (I know people say "there is no royal road to geometry" but for me it worked).

Thanks for sharing your experience.

Upon reading I felt identified (hyperlexic having trouble reading math as if it was prose). I still tell myself “I like math”. But it's true that when I think of “doing math”, I envision a study situation with the stressors removed.

I also had a similar experience with meta readings, funny.

I just can't bring myself to care about fantasy role playing games, entertainment based on comic book superheroes, or board games. I have friends who are very serious about some of these topics, and I struggle greatly to pay attention when these things are being discussed. I have some very nerdy interests, but these are not among them.

On one hand, I want to be supportive and happy for them that they are involved in something nerdy and creative, but on the other it's like hearing about somebody's vivid dreams. Neat for them, not great for me.

I love hearing about people's vivid dreams. Especially weird ones. I feel guilty for hating it when people talk about sports. I just walk away because I cannot participate in the conversation, even if I want to. Which I don't. But it feels rude.

What about Kingdome Come? It have some same mechanics like fantasy games but it's basically medieval simulator. Actually pretty good one.

Me too, everyone around me is into board games, video games, nerdy movies etc and they always assume I'm into them too. It always sucks when I reveal I don't like these things and you see the enthusiasm going off their faces :/

I work as a librarian (and have been one for 25+ years), but I kind of hate the things that librarians should care about. I got into this business because I like helping elderly people in my community with their smartphones and tablets, and getting children to read. I don't care about cosplaying as a social worker or lawyer, fighting injustice and challenging assumptions; I just want to help Mildred w her iPad so she can zoom with her grandkids.

Jazz is my guilty displeasure. To me is the epitome of music that, to quote Peter Griffin, ‘insists upon itself.’ The more navel-gazing it is, the less I care for it.

I feel like this is something we shed bit by bit as we age. When people talk about becoming a more authentic version of themselves as they get older, I think this is part of it.

Winter is my guilty displeasure. I live in Alberta, where winters are relatively long/cold, and I'm near places where I can ski, so I should probably make the most of winter. But, I'm happy with indoor hobbies, and the occasional toboggan/skate/snowball fight with my kid.

Where then does the old man yelling at clouds meme come from? Seems like it's just as likely to become even more further entrenched and crotchety as you age.

I don't see a contradiction. The old man yelling at clouds certainly could have given up on trying to enjoy the "right" things and having the "right" opinions.

I suspect it has a lot to do with the desire to find and fit in with "your" social group. Once you've found it and feel established in it, a lot of the pressure to fit in disappears.

Mine are Rust and Go.

Rust: I simply don't like the syntax

Go: It just feels "wrong". There's something off about it. I feel as if it is an evolutionary dead end.

There are two such mechanisms proposed. Ambivalence theory that says you can both like and dislike something at the same time e.g. smoking. Cognitive dissonance is that you like as you are supposed to like according to your teachings and and upbringing which might not be fully in sync your real neural response e.g. liking famous people when they might be crap.

Politics. I used to be really into them but they just make your life miserable and most discussions are pointless since the topic is always very broad, which makes it have a ton of side effects which then need to be ignored since everyone's trying to solve political issues that have existed hundreds of years in 20 minutes with extreme policy swings.

Opera is a pretty widespread guilty displeasure I actually also share. When I read "poetry" I immediately was like "yes, here, me!!!" I even remember the moment in my life when appreciating poetry was destroyed. Two instnaces. First was when I was forced to learn a poem by heart in early school. And the second one my german teacher (a few years later) gave me a poem about my disability, for interpretation. Mind you, written by a person not sharing that disability. All I could do for one hour was to stare at the lines and plain hate the author for being so pretentious, and hating my teacher for assuming that topic would be open for grabs...

No guilty pleaasures or displeasures. like what you like and accept it.

( I like Nickelback, they were pretty solid at what they were. There i said it.

I should like house of leaves, but I couldn't get into it. Same for early Bruce Sterling. )

This reminds me of the anti reading list, for books that you'd like to say you've read.

The charitable perspective is that if everyone in your circle likes a thing, you might be missing an opportunity to enjoy something Objectively Great. That's why you force yourself to try stuff.

On the other hand, you have to learn to give up 100 pages into a book that everyone loves, and sometimes admit that you just don't get a movie.

I've been reflecting on my career recently, and I realized that I've built an identity around my career in software engineering. This was something younger me never wanted to do, but going with the flow brought me here and it took getting a promotion to realize and reflect this. I've been in a loop of thoughts, thinking about switching, but also thinking about the time I've already spent here and wanting to stay.

Is the guilty pleasure here one that you feel the satisfaction/enjoyment/reward is one that your younger self would disdain?

It's okay to evolve your thinking on this. Some of my younger ideas were conclusively proven wrong, payed for by the consequences of my actions and all that. Younger me clearly got a few things wrong, I feel like I need to re-examine my preconceptions often.

I'm supposed to like They Might Be Giants and Talking Heads, but I just can't. Even after a Terry Gross marathon of Fresh Air.

I listened to TMBG early on in my music life and eventually came to "not particularly enjoy" them. Talking Heads, on the other hand, have only gotten better and better in my opinion.

I mean COME ON https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xphLY5ucIpQ

Same. The other good track on that album is Slippery People https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rx2_iHftARo

I love TMBG, and I tried to get my wife into them, but it never really vibed with her, which is fine.

That said, we went to a TMBG concert in Brooklyn about 11 years ago, and she actually had a really good time, and was even singing along to some of the songs. With music, the context of "how you're listening to the music" is equally important to the music itself.

They Might Be Giants is in an interesting space.

Their lyrics are very clever and interesting.

But their music is terrible. What the world needs is for someone with musical talent to redo the music to TMBG's corpus.

The great outdoors. Hiking, skiing, camping in the wilderness. I always aspired to be a person who genuinely enjoys this shit but at 50 I decided that yeah, this ain't going to happen. All indicators point to me being the kind of person who likes this stuff - locale, income level, fitness level, age etc.

I spent decades trying to learn to ignore mosquito bites or frigid cold or vicious rain to no avail. It's just not me. I wasn't cut from that cloth and never will be. The sad part is though that my dear son and to some degree my wife ARE cut from that very cloth. And that means that most of the family activities that they thrive on have always been an endurance test for myself.

What about like easy day hikes on 70 degree days?

Meh at best. Even in ideal conditions say, skiing in the Alps on a -5C sunny day feels like a bit of a chore. When I'm out there I sorta, kinda can convince myself that I like doing it but the chore of getting the gear packed, lining up for lift tickets, changing into the clumsy gear and all that other ceremony makes it on balance, not worth it. Same goes for all other outdoorsy stuff.

That sounds like you just don’t like the climate + ecology of the place you happen to live / the places people around you enjoy visiting. Ain’t no mosquitoes or cold or rain in Arizona.

Yeah, I'm not American and haven't been to Arizona. But from my understanding it can and regularly gets hellishly hot there, no?

But there is something to what you say in that I can definitely spend more time outside on a mellow sunny day in Spain than on just about any day in Eastern Canada where I reside. But it's still not what I yearn for. I'm not a couch potato though as I'm a pretty hardcore freestyle swimmer. So it's not an issue of low energy due to lack of exercise.

I hate being outdoors 99.999% of the time, so much so that I will blanket declare "I hate the outdoors". Not just "the great outdoors" - I don't like sitting on a patio, in the shade, in what others call "perfect springtime weather". I'd rather be in a basement room with no windows.

The Mojave in the summertime at night (if and only if the sun is 100% behind the horizon) is really, properly, exquisite. My knowledge of its existence makes me irrationally angry whenever I have to be outdoors any other time/place, which is the aforementioned 99.999% of the time. The only other exception is the Sea of Crete, just before dawn or just after sunset, in May or September exclusively. It's a tiny, tiny, tiny sliver of the overall lifelong experience of being forced to deal with Earth's atmosphere.

Arizona has cold. I used to visit a place where you could see ski lifts; although I was never there when they were operating.

I'm the same way. I kind of hate going outside, but I have this kind of fetishized perspective of the "primal man, livnig off the land". I have friends who like to hike, so occasionally when they'd invite me to come along I would come with them, and then spend the entire trip trying to convince myself that I'm having fun.

Eventually I realized, NOPE. I don't enjoy this. I don't like walking on uneven terrain, I don't like getting dirt all over myself, I don't like being far away from cell service, I don't like camping, etc. Genuinely not trying to convince anyone else to change their opinions, if you like this stuff by all means keep doing it. Sometimes, though, I think it's worth doing an "emotional inventory", and actually questioning how much you enjoy the things you think you enjoy.

I love hiking, but I always encourage people to start with short walks in nice places. You need a solid foundation of nice, normal, fun times before you start thinking about walking 17km a day through a freezing leech-infested mud pit, and more importantly you need time to work out what you actually enjoy.

dust, hay fever, pollen, gnats, ugh!

I have gotten into watching Street Fighter tournaments online and recently found out about Tool Assisted gameplay for emulators. Not sure I have time for hacking ROMs but do enjoy those tournaments

Oh. That's definitely my ~6 years old kid. I should spend >= 90 minutes of high quality time with him every weekday after he comes back from school, but nowadays I'm only spending 45-60 minutes. And I'm not reading much to him these months. The "good" news is that grandparents will go back next month, so I gotta pick up more time with my kid. Not sure about the quality, though. Sometimes I don't enjoy doing things he enjoys to do, so I fake for about 15 minutes and call a break. I can't wait for the him he reaches 6 -- I'll gift him a RPi loaded with DOSBian, sit with him every Wed evening to code QBASIC games. I'll ask him to do the design and I'll code it before him. He doesn't read yet, but maybe by then he can read some simple words.

The other one is efficiency. I spend a lot of time doing things that have nothing to do with the objectives that I set. If I measure myself using the Carmack productivity metric[1], I probably won't even finish 1 CD every day. My productivity has gone down a lot since I completed my previous learning project at the end of Jan so it really sucks. I feel that I'm wasting my life away.

So anyway, these are the two symptoms that show I'm a bit messy inside.

[1]: Brian Hook once wrote in his blog that John Carmack used to measure his own productivity by playing CD while working. If he stopped working, even for going to the bathroom, he would pause the play. At the end of the day he counted how much time the player played.

"Guilty" seems like the wrong word. Calling something like exercise a "guilty displeasure" just doesn't seem right

It's much more simply stated as: "displeasure"

No. The author doesn't like pop music, but that's not a guilty displeasure, because he doesn't think he should like it.

Right. It's not "guilty" at all

Read. Found it interesting. "My kind of social class...". Immediate close.

My life got a lot better years ago when I became honest with myself about the things I like and dislike, regardless of whether or not they are "in character" or even "normal".

I really, really hate being outdoors. I don't like jazz. I really enjoy Lady Gaga. Oasis is a great band, despite their fanbase being mostly wankers. MCU movies are for the simpleminded. ebooks on an e-ink device offer a much better reading experience than paper books. Dogs and young children are terrible to be around.

Live your life. You don't have to go around advertising how weird you are, but don't be afraid to live authentically.

No argument from me about opera. The music is often fabulous but the “acting” is histrionic, the plots are generally overwrought, and the singing is like watching the 400th lap of the Indy 500. First two laps were kind of cool but now we’re in the fourth act and why can’t this tenor stop yelling?

But I don’t have any guilt about my displeasure. I’m a snob about some things, a reverse snob about other things, and some things I just like or dislike for whatever reason.

Some people wrap a lot of their social identity up in passing an invisible bar in the level or type of interests they hold.

Its soo relaxing. I fall asleep every time and its not anything to do with interest or bordeom. Also if its in a foreign language. Super deep sleep

> and the singing is like watching the 400th lap of the Indy 500. First two laps were kind of cool

Not sure if you know, but the Indy 500 only goes to 200 laps; watching the 400th lap has got to be super boring :P. OTOH, the Wienie 500 [1] ran at Indianapolis Motor Speedway and was only two laps; I guess there's a 100x inflation in the miles number there, but I'm ok with it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMyES63Rgvg

TIL. Well that shows how little I know about the domain of my metaphor I guess.

I’ll amend my uninformed comparison to be the 150th lap but the point is the same: watching world-class talent do a clearly difficult thing in a way that is repetitive and unengaging to me.

people

It’s the IT career requirement to keep abreast of everything in tech while being cursed to know most of it is various forms of unnecessary for the supermajority of IT/Enterprise use cases. A few highlights:

* Most infrastructure does not need Kubernetes. Your ERP doesn’t need Helm charts, your internal Confluence doesn’t need HA K8s clusters, your Grafana is cheaper on ECS than GKE, and your zScaler estate flatly doesn’t support it. Kubernetes is amazingly awesome but the equivalent of using nuclear weapons to go duck hunting for most folks.

* AI, for all its power and capability, is too unreliable for wholesale automation - especially when you can just use it to generate the code or software to run the same automations infinitely with deterministic outputs. Your entire org doesn’t need Claude Code Pro Max 20x subs, you just need to get better at getting the code needed for infinite repetition without the AI sub

* Your fridge, oven, microwave, coffee maker, toaster oven, furnace filter, and dishwasher don’t need WiFi, Bluetooth, or Cloud Connectivity. They just don’t.

* Public Cloud didn’t let you reduce your infrastructure headcount, but it did make it easier for shadow IT to consume more spend, make your headcount more expensive and specialized, and put your infrastructure eggs in the same basket as millions of others, which surely will never become a problem. (/s)

* If you can run basic infra (compute, VPCs, storage, networking) for one public cloud provider, you can run them all. If you’re requiring Architect certs just to run VMs in a landing zone, you’re spending way too much for way too little.

* VLANs and a firewall are enough for 90% of use cases. The only reason you need a NGFW for layer 7 filtering is because vendors stopped publishing what IP ranges, FQDNs, and ports their stuff uses, and that’s less a justification for NGFW’s and more a damning indictment of shitty security practices industry-wide.

* VMs are fine. Containers are nice and efficient, but VMs are still perfectly fine. I am tired of having this conversation with folks who don’t know what containers do but think they’re God’s answer to the myriad of faults of VMs (that they also can’t identify)

* You don’t need Ansible, Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi to “automate” workflows. Oftentimes all you need are cronjobs and webhooks, rather than another whole-ass set of sludgepipes.

* You don’t need a data lake, you need to do a better job identifying which data points are meaningful in a context and capturing them efficiently.

I love technology. I love learning about technology. I love solving problems with technology.

I hate the insistence that everything be maximally technological in nature and that every product must be adopted in order to not be left behind.

I hate the lack of discipline, is what I’m saying.

Amen!

what is "mainstream global anglo pop music"? Anglo apparently means "white"? Is there such a thing as "mainstream global anglo pop music"? I certainly can't separate many mainstream global pop music by the race of the person singing.

Anglo likely just means English-language.

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