DavidPiper

Not OP but I've also read and recommended The Comfort Crisis.

Stepping further down the "better personal health" path, there's Outlive by Peter Attia. Stepping further down the "addiction to convenience" path, there's Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke.

Both excellent books and perspectives worth reading. (Both audiobooks are great too.)

I agree with you too, but I don't think it's necessarily a gross over-exaggeration: it's possible that the majority of the buying population are extremely vulnerable to manipulation.

"Average" doesn't necessarily mean half way between two extremes - the average human might actually be all of:

- extremely vulnerable to manipulation

- struggling with impulse control

- prone to making bad financial decisions

- the elderly / kids (<16/>60)

Based on age demographics, rampant consumerism and social media addiction, especially in those age demographics, I'd be more inclined to guess the average human is all of those things.

Remember when Firefox was the first browser to have "tabbed browsing"?

Obviously UBO isn't a first party feature - but if only Firefox could generate as much traction about ad blocking as they did with tabs.

At the start of this year I wrote down "Get rid of your Airpods" as a New Years Resolution. This was basically my proxy for "stop filling every spare moment with audiobooks and podcasts".

I still haven't done it, and my reflex for listening to something - even after my listening backlogs emptied a few months back - suggests I'm essentially addicted. Especially considering how much better I feel when I don't take my airpods out with me.

So, time to deal with that I guess. Thanks for the push.

> The person [is not super fired up and] doesn’t just want to act as a soldier for their team

This pulled me into a tangential thought:

Has anyone else noticed that a lot of people just CAN'T be wrong? They might be contrarian, cynical, narcissists, experts in their field, experiencing PTSD or other emotional disregulation, extremely online, ... Then the team-based things: political entrenchment, [colour]-pilled, conspiracy theorists, religious, Collingwood supporters (kidding) ...

Finding people who are genuinely interested in learning about things that might change their views in substantial ways is very hard. Even when you find people genuinely interested in learning, it's so common to see evidence take a back seat to political or religious views. It makes you feel crazy sometimes.

and hexaflexagons are the bestaflexagons

When I was 11, I pulled a book off the shelf at the nearby library called "Teach Yourself C++ in 21 Days". I remember thinking the title was clearly nonsense, but if I could even learn a fraction of it, that would be pretty cool. We didn't have a computer at home yet, so I wrote out the exercises by hand.

I think I got about a third of the way through. I knew (debatably) what inheritance was, that a Dog is an Animal, etc.

School, university, and 10 years of career later across multiple stacks and companies, there's still a heap I don't know, but you can drop me in a lot of codebases and I'll figure it out.

> So go ahead and buy that Java/Ruby/Javascript/PHP book; you'll probably get some use out of it. But you won't change your life, or your real overall expertise as a programmer in 24 hours or 21 days.

True, but it DID change my life.

Very happy JamCorder customer here. I've started playing in improv shows since I bought it too, and it's nice to have those on record!

It's rare that I come across a product I have literally zero complaints about, or any feedback to offer. Even my concern that it was tied to an app that might disappear one day is of course covered by the fact that it's all just MIDI files on a card.

Thank you so much for making this, it's basically a perfect product for me and I love it. No notes.

FWIW I don't think it's pathetic at all, and I have the same reaction as you to a lot of things on HN. There are a wide variety of topics that bring out various biases and other cognitive blind spots in people, and bots.

Space travel seems to be one of the more harmless ones, but I agree it's frustrating to see people implicitly or explicitly skip over things like near-light-speed travel as solved problem, then reject arguments from others as "not thinking big enough", etc.

In general, divorce from reality doesn't seem to be related to intelligence at all in my experience. I'm sure there are plenty of times when my wishful thinking gets in the way too.

Oh that hit me more than I thought it would, thank you.

> Pop-ups! Pop-ups everywhere!

This part, at least, is satire, right? The rest I largely agree with :-)

And their reputation suffered so much that we're calling it out on an internet forum decades later.