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The lack of buttons is also extremely annoying on kitchen appliances. To open my microwave door, I need to make sure my finger is clean (it’s a kitchen!) and also adds a very annoying latency between the “pressing” and the door opening.

As I was reading I thought “hey my Skoda seems to be ok with most of these things”, having gone for it more or less for the same reasons. Skoda seems to get it better. Is it because being a non-luxury tier car, they value function over form much more?

One of my most vivid memories from my childhood (around 10 years old) is trying to make a ticking analog clock using Logo, with the turtle drawing all the hands.

We had "no screen in the morning" house rule - we had to eat, play outside first while it was not too hot. I woke up and realised what was wrong with my code. And my mum made an exception to the rule and the fix worked! I am so grateful to her for understanding the importance of the moment and allowing me to do the fix. I guess I'll give her a call and tell her the story now :) Thanks HackerNews!

This is definitely not recommended but when I was a kid we also used floppy disk films to look at solar eclipses. That was far from the most dangerous thing we did in 90s in a post-Soviet country.

To this day, when I read or think about a solar eclipse, I have a visual image of floppies! My first instinct seeing this on HN was “is this because there is a solar eclipse tomorrow?”

> You probably need to change the thought experiment to get at what you're really trying to get at.

I am not really trying to get to anything except to have fun thinking about how society would organise itself. And since this is not an exam, everyone's free to think through different versions and enjoy the question as they like.

As for me, normally it comes up in a discussion and we develop and make assumptions as we go, but I've prefer to change as little as possible e.g. buildings/infrastructure do disappear but people "land" gently. And then most of what you said would be true: people in inappropriate climates, far away from a source of water or food die. I don't think it makes the thought experiment any less interesting to think about. In fact, the reason I like it is because progress may become so slow that some generations later we'd start believing or question in mythical iPhones and technologies.

Before opening the article, I thought it's about a shirt buttons and it reminded me one of my favourite thought experiments:

Imagine everything man-made suddenly disappears but not the knowledge individuals carry. How long until we have an iPhone (or a plastic shirt button)? Would it even be any faster than the first time around?

> That's because they haven't came out with another small iPhone in more than four years.

I kind of agree with the previous comment. I think if you spend a lot of time on the phone, have a lot of apps then it makes sense to upgrade your phone more frequently and also makes sense to have a larger screen and better battery life. So conversely, there is a correlation between people who have smaller phones and upgrade less frequently.

I have my iPhone 12mini for 5-6 years now, and I'd upgrade it now if there was a new small iPhone. But I would upgrade it 3 years ago.

One of my best stranger conversations talking to a “Big Issue” [1] seller outside a supermarket. As I understand, they’re (close to) homeless usually.

When I asked about him, he mentioned he’s Irish but moved on to tell me about his plans. How he was saving to have a farm, planned what to grow, animals - 15m of quite precise description. His story was his future.

This was striking for me - when asked most people tell you about their past, where they’re coming from. It was the first time I realised that where we’re going should be a bigger part of our story and identity.

I try to keep that conversation in mind as a lesson, and as a reminder to talk to people around.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Issue

One of my best stranger conversations talking to a “Big Issue” seller outside a supermarket. As I understand, they’re (close to) homeless usually [1].

When I asked about him, he mentioned he’s Irish but moved on to tell me about his plans. How he was saving to have a farm, planned what to grow, animals - 15m of quite precise description. His story was his future.

This was striking for me - when asked most people tell you about their past, where they’re coming from. It was the first time I realised that where we’re going should be a bigger part of our story and identity.

I try to keep that conversation in mind.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Issue

I used it once since COVID, last year, didn't seem too bad.

Given the mood in the thread, I do indeed think that I may have a high tolerance for such practices and pay careful attention to fine prints. After all, I had all the training while applying for numerous Schengen and other visas, immigration paperwork. After those, dealing with Ryanair that faces at least some competition and scrutiny is not that bad.

When was this? I have zero recollection of ever doing credit card number formatting anywhere.

I have found myself to be the only person in many conversations defending Ryanair. People complain about legroom, everything being a paid add-ons, you name it. The key is to treat it like a bus that takes you from A to B, sometimes cheaper than a bus, not some sort of luxury experience. The times when flying was luxury is over. And I benefitted from it greatly as a student, so have many shown by Ryanair's passenger numbers.

And I am also always confused about the non-transparency that people mention about their fees. When you do the checkout, you select the services you want and pay for those. There used to be a time when other airlines would have a lot of things included in the basic ticket price, but that's not the case anymore, so it's not different. And I think this was an inevitable in an industry with small profit margins where price differentiation would bring gains.

Exactly this. I do not think this is a case of Hanlon's razor. Assuming incompetence or stupidity of the government officials trying to push for is very dangerous.

(Great username, btw, SirHumphrey)

I understand what you mean, but I disagree. The technology allows for robot vacuums to exist and I don’t see the cloud connection as a mandatory need for it. Similarly, I want my car to have say lane assist but we don’t expect to have cloud connection with it.

Tangential rant: It’s becoming hard to buy dumb appliances.

I was looking at robot vacuums, and most need internet connection at least for setup - by which point it’s already uploaded your floor plan and who knows what to the cloud.

The drivers are doing alright :)

I just realized that if you google the font (e.g. "Calibri font"), you get the search results in that font. Neat!

Read it with or to your kids. It is an adult book just as much as it is a children’s book. Something there for all stages of life.

And outside France too!

I would add that there is something in it for all ages. I have read it many times, between ages 6 and 25 and in different languages. The later readings were for language learning without any expectations but each time I finished it, I was deeply touched.

With that it’s also a great one to read with kids.

There was a point in university when I was trying to find the "best" note taking system to be organized and as efficient as possible. Tried some tablets, did latex live during lectures, markdown, you name it. Each time I wanted to do something I'd get blocked on deciding where to write.

Then I realized that I spend more time about thinking about how to organize my notes than actually taking the notes, or even more importantly focus on the content.

That was a freeing realization that got me unblocked. Now I do not have a "system". My thoughts go wherever is most convenient at that moment, I have papers lying around, docs, Apple notes. If they turn out to be important, they'll naturally become structured.

That being said, whenever I see some tool like this, I still have a passing thought - ah, that's a great system I should have it, it will enable me to be more productive :)

Came to write something along these lines. I do this for restaurants, and sometimes for the places that refuse to take cash. But I do not have hope that such behaviour will impact the restaurants' policies: it's usually chains or non-owner-ran places that will have a "high-tech" policy and I am not sure if this kind of feedback reaches the decision makers.

But these days (for now) finding another restaurant is easy. The author mentions that his gym requires having a smartphone. Now, that's a much bigger problem.

I have (re)discovered paper todo-lists, but not in a notebook but just a single A6 paper that I keep in my pocket the whole day.

Since it's always in my pocket, I see it spontaneously during the day, and as a result, I manage to focus on it more. Have tried apps, but the fact I had to click the app would make me easily forget it, and get distracted on other things on the phone.

I look at it every evening and write the one for the next day, and have the last few lying around near my bed. As one of the other comments mentioned, this ritual may be more important than the medium but I find keeping a ritual with paper has been easier.

I was pouring tea from an expensive porcelain teapot, and was annoyed that it was dripping from the spout while we have some very cheap ones at home that get it right.

After the initial "hey, this would be fun to model" thought, realized that it's not that simple after all with a number of recent papers on it. The blog is a nice summary.

Lesson: Take some water with you to teapot shopping!

I wanted to work on a similar idea recently for my personal use, but I wanted to use books and stories that already have the texts in the two languages that I am interested in (e.g. Harry Potter).

So you pass in two texts and get back some form of aligned text. If you have some knowledge of the language you are trying to learn and are ok without a perfect sentence-to-sentence alignment, then this would work.

My motivation is to improve my wife's and my knowledge of each other's languages while reading books to our daughter.

For a moment I got excited that someone else had already built it :)

I think having time and opportunity to be bored is actually a luxury that many have nowadays. Growing up in a village where my grandma was basically doing subsistence farming, I recall that she didn't have that moment to daydream. This was not uncommon some time ago, as this great post from last week about labour movement was mentioning [1].

Given this, I find that daydreaming is in a way an expression of a freedom and luxury that we have. I find myself starting to think deeply about some topics in those moments. Spending that time on a smartphone/social media is wasting a freedom that we have. I used to check news or watch something more frequently before I had this realization and not doing that has greatly improved my state of mind.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43856798