Comment by lynguist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lynguist | Hacker News Reader

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I don't understand the unwarranted and ongoing care and enthusiasm for this category of e-waste that was forcibly put upon us.

They came out in 2008, were sold until 2010, had literally less performance than a 2000 Pentium III CPU, were lauded from pundits left and right, and probably the school/hand-me-down laptops of that age (like today's e-waste class Chromebooks).

Especially when Acer and whatever had proper laptops with proper Intel SU-class CPUs and 3-4 GB RAM for the same price.

I disliked these "netbooks" back then and still do, and all that followed its footsteps, including the "laptop"-lookalikes with 32 GB e-MMC storage some mobile carriers would give out with their plans.

It's a disrespectful destitute class of computing.

I know that the Raspberry Pis came out later, but a Raspberry Pi 2 is a hundred times better engineered and well-rounded product, that will also run a desktop better than these netbooks (or at all).

On a related note, I also have colleagues at work who will run only sub-200 dollar smartphones and enjoy living the proper Nigeria/Bangladesh experience from 1-2 years ago. I also know that they don't use heating at home, and do everything in the name of efficiency.

The eee-pc was amazingly attractive in a time when laptops were heavy.

I used to carry one in my toolbox when I worked as a network field tech.

If you needed a cheap, light laptop at the time, this was your only option. The MacBook Air came out two years later.

It was cheap, small and light.

Do you understand the unbridled desire to consume a massive amount of resources to move a human body in a multi-ton knobby-tyred truck from home to school to work to grocery store and back, and to play the flashiest games, to wear shorts inside during the winter, and to talk to robots as if they are friends? I understand that desire, and how, with billions of people having access to such power over enough time, we are now "enjoying" extreme weather more frequently, killing so much other life with our pollution, and harming ourselves in the process? And, because that is stressful to face, many of us are inclined to dive back into the consumption cycle for distraction and diversion?

I'd argue my quality of life is higher for using only hand-me-down phones (current one is ~8yo, thanks to LineageOS) because when I'm feeling dysregulated I run out of phone-based distractions really quickly (I don't allow JavaScript, and I don't install any games). I'm healthier for walking and cycling everywhere within ~16km of home (privileged to live in the city, as expensive as it has become, but I'd still do it if I lived further out), and for using heating & cooling only to take the edge off the outside temperature (16C in the winter, 26C in the summer), mindful of where all this energy comes from, what the effects are at scale, and the quality of life of future generations long after I'm dead. I don't do all this for efficiency, but for effectiveness (that of my body, my default mobility and data-processing machine) and consuming a reasonable amount of energy rather than one that, at scale, will burn my house down.

Regarding not-yet e-waste, some people just like tinkering, and the challenge of getting old hardware to still function as a useful tool.

I also understand the reaction to other people's "nonsense"; I sometimes go there, too, and it's an ongoing effort to reel it back to what I can reasonably control.

Is it helpful to have all this spelled out for you?

Yes, I understand. I wrote it in a too polemic and dismissive way but what I wanted to say is:

- there's a type of "puritan" people that is outright against enjoyment (if not "deserved") (I think you understand what I mean even if I don't go in detail) (and this type of people can often be extremely effective engineers and also managers)

- and that there's a type of engineering that makes disproportionately bad outcomes like a price point that is let's say 15% cheaper but a performance that is 80% lower, and that that shouldn't be lauded

I basically had the choice between this and no laptop at the time ...

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